Weary with her thoughts, she moved toward the window. The library was now completely dark, and she was surprised to see how much faint light the outer world still held. As she peered out into it across the court, a figure shaped itself in the tapering perspective of bare lines: it looked a mere blot of deeper gray in the grayness, and for an instant, as it moved toward her, her heart thumped to the thought, “It’s the ghost!” She had time, in that long instant, to feel suddenly that the man of whom, two months earlier, she had a brief distant vision from the roof was now, at his predestined hour, about to reveal himself as _not_ having been Peters; and her spirit sank under the impending fear of the disclosure. But almost with the next tick of the clock the ambiguous figure, gaining substance and character, showed itself even to her weak sight as her husband’s; and she turned away to meet him, as he entered, with the confession of her folly. “It’s really too absurd,” she laughed out from the threshold, “but I never _can_ remember!” “Remember what?” Boyne questioned as they drew together. “That when one sees the Lyng ghost one never knows it.” Her hand was on his sleeve, and he kept it there, but with no response in his gesture or in the lines of his fagged, preoccupied face. “Did you think you’d seen it?” he asked, after an appreciable interval. “Why, I actually took _you_ for it, my dear, in my mad determination to spot it!” “Me--just now?” His arm dropped away, and he turned from her with a faint echo of her laugh. “Really, dearest, you’d better give it up, if that’s the best you can do.” “Yes, I give it up--I give it up. Have _you?”_ she asked, turning round on him abruptly. The parlor-maid had entered with letters and a lamp, and the light struck up into Boyne’s face as he bent above the tray she presented. “Have _you?”_ Mary perversely insisted, when the servant had disappeared on her errand of illumination. “Have I what?” he rejoined absently, the light bringing out the sharp stamp of worry between his brows as he turned over the letters. “I never tried,” he said, tearing open the wrapper of a newspaper. “Well, of course,” Mary persisted, “the exasperating thing is that there’s no use trying, since one can’t be sure till so long afterward.” He was unfolding the paper as if he had hardly heard her; but after a pause, during which the sheets rustled spasmodically between his hands, he lifted his head to say abruptly, “Have you any idea _how long?”_ Mary had sunk into a low chair beside the fireplace. From her seat she looked up, startled, at her husband’s profile, which was darkly projected against the circle of lamplight. “No; none. Have _you_” she retorted, repeating her former phrase with an added keenness of intention. Boyne crumpled the paper into a bunch, and then inconsequently turned back with it toward the lamp.