By the time I had my shoes on, and went again to the window, he had passed out of its range. I ran to one on the stair that looked at right angles to mine: he had not yet come within its field. I stood and waited. Presently he appeared, crawling along, a gray mounted ghost, in the light that so strangely befits lovers wandering in the May of hope, and the wasted spectre no less, whose imagination of the past reveals him to the eyes of men. For an instant I almost wished him dead and at rest; the next I was out of the house--then up on the moor, looking eagerly this way and that, poised on the swift feet of love, ready to spring to his bosom. How I longed to lead him to his own warm bed, and watch by him as he slept, while the great father kept watch over every heart in his universe. I gazed and gazed, but nowhere could I see the death-jaded horseman. I bounded down the hill, through the wilderness and the dark alleys, and hurried to the stable. Trembling with haste I led Zoe out, sprang on her bare back, and darted off to scout the moor. Not a man or a horse or a live thing was to be seen in any direction! Once more I all but concluded I had looked on an apparition. Was my uncle dead? Had he come back thus to let me know? And was he now gone home indeed? Cold and disappointed, I returned to bed, full of the conviction that I had seen my uncle, but whether in the body or out of the body, I could not tell. When John came, the notion of my having been out alone on the moor in the middle of the night, did not please him. He would have me promise not again, for any vision or apparition whatever, to leave the house without his company. But he could not persuade me. He asked what I would have done, if, having overtaken the horseman, I had found neither my uncle nor Death. I told him I would have given Zoe the use of her heels, when _that_ horse would soon have seen the last of her. At the same time, he was inclined to believe with me, that I had seen my uncle. His intended proximity would account, he said, for his making no arrangement to hear from me; and if he continued to haunt the moor in such fashion, we could not fail to encounter him before long. In the meantime he thought it well to show no sign of suspecting his neighbourhood. That I had seen my uncle, John was for a moment convinced when, the very next day, having gone to Wittenage, he saw Thanatos carrying Dr. Southwell, my uncle's friend. On the other hand, Thanatos looked very much alive, and in lovely condition! The doctor would not confess to knowing anything about my uncle, and expressed wonder that he had not yet returned, but said he did not mind how long he had the loan of such a horse. Things went on as before for a while.