On the night in question Gilead, after attending the meeting, had dined en famille with a Cabinet Minister in sympathy with its objects. He left early, purposing to pay a visit to the Agency--long-closed, of course--in order to consult some papers bearing on the matter. As, nodding to the porter who admitted him, he climbed the long stairs to his private room, a queer sense of _something accompanying_ seized upon him all in an instant. It was a quite odd and unusual feeling, breaking into a preoccupation which had been profound. He looked right and left in a curious way, stopped, considered a minute--then, with a little laugh moved on and up. The feeling had gone: perhaps, he thought, it had outstripped him in that momentary pause. The little shock and throb of nerve evoked by the thought stopped him a second time. He gave a self-conscious look, first upwards then backwards, saw the hall empty and the porter gone, laughed once more, but uneasily, and turned the corner of the stairs that mounted to his room. Certainly he did pause in a quick trepidation as he fitted in the key. His breath fluttered uncomfortably; a sense of enormous isolation in those attics of swimming night gripped and astounded him; he began to think of the things that might come bubbling up from the wells of gloom beneath. But his courage was always the master of his imagination, potent as that was; and the next instant he had turned the key and entered. As he switched on the electric light, he saw a young woman standing above the desk by the blinded window. In the first moment of discovery he would not doubt but that the figure was that of Miss Halifax herself, either remaining, or returned after hours, to get through some arrears of work. He would not doubt, I say, though he had never yet known the amanuensis moved to such a course; but in reality he was fighting for nerve and resolution to meet a shock which he foresaw to be inevitable. And the next instant it came. The figure turned, revealing itself that of a stranger, seemed to look at him intently, and in the very fact was gone. For minutes Gilead remained perfectly motionless where he stood. Heroes, like monarchs, should meet death erect; and so had not he met and overcome it? He thought that if he had moved in the first shudder of the blow, he would have fallen and died. The realization that he--he himself--had seen an apparition, had endured that mortal experience from whose fear all take refuge in scepticism, was like a sudden shocking revelation of a friend’s treachery. Reason alone could surmount the horror, and he waited rigidly for reason to return.