“The evening he came back I was sitting in my room alone. I had just got back from the play, the subject of which had been, it so happened, the influence of people recently dead upon those left behind. I suppose that’s what turned my mind to my sorrow of the previous year when I lost him. It is my husband I am talking about. “I was sitting gazing at the fire, and I expect you will say I had fallen asleep. Perhaps I had. It doesn’t matter really. “We had been happy enough together, he and I. Just an ordinary married couple, you might say. But now and then a terrible longing would come over me just to see him once more, ... to hear him speak, ... to touch him.... I know it is selfish, and maybe unwise, to give way to those feelings, ... but never mind that! Well, on the night I am telling you about, there came to my recollection some of the silly cantrips those Spiritualist people used to carry on. Oh, yes, it is quite true: I had gone once or twice to see them, and had even taken part in their services—séances, I should say—in James’s lifetime, I mean, before he died. Indeed I went with him.... I never went after.... I don’t know.... It seemed to me like trifling somehow. Anyhow I have never gone since. “All the same there came into my head a curious jingling rhyme I had heard them repeat once or twice, because they said somebody called Plato or Plautus or something had used it. It would bring back the dead, so they used to say, if you recited it alone at midnight, and accompanied it with certain gestures. The words are nothing but gibberish, a jumbled sort of.... No, I’m not going to repeat them.... Let me go on. “Before I had realised what I was doing, without stopping to think, I uttered the words aloud, moving my arms so as to follow the ritual. Scarcely were the syllables out of my mouth—it closes with the name and the clock was striking twelve as I spoke it—scarcely, I say, were the words out of my mouth when—God! the pang comes yet when I think of it!—I heard the latch-key going into the hall door, and the door slowly opening—I was alone in the flat, and—oh! I can never tell you! I felt dreadful!—I didn’t know how to undo the thing, and yet I knew it was wrong—wicked—I never for a moment thought.—Perhaps it had been my longing so much.—The hall door opened.—The chain wasn’t up.—I heard a step,—a cough—oh! the usual sounds he used to make when he came in.—What would he be like?—What...? what...? “Then the door of the room opened, and there he stood, swinging himself backwards and forwards, half toes, half heels, in a way he had, and replacing his jingling keys in his trouser-pocket—I could only stare at him speechless, and gasp—till suddenly he stretched out his hand and pointed at me with a ... a sort of snarl.