England -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction; Love stories; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
I had filled one page of the pocket-book, and had just turned to the
next, when I became conscious of a difficulty in fixing my attention on
the subject that was before it. I was at once reminded of the similar
difficulty which I felt in Shetland, when I had tried vainly to arrange
the composition of the letter to my mother which Miss Dunross was to
write. By way of completing the parallel, my thoughts wandered now, as
they had wandered then, to my latest remembrance of Mrs. Van Brandt.
In a minute or two I began to feel once more the strange physical
sensations which I had first experienced in the garden at Mr. Dunross's
house. The same mysterious trembling shuddered through me from head to
foot. I looked about me again, with no distinct consciousness of what
the objects were on which my eyes rested. My nerves trembled, on that
lovely summer night, as if there had been an electric disturbance in the
atmosphere and a storm coming. I laid my pocket-book and pencil on
the table, and rose to go out again under the trees. Even the trifling
effort to cross the room was an effort made in vain. I stood rooted to
the spot, with my face turned toward the moonlight streaming in at the
open door.
An interval passed, and as I still looked out through the door, I became
aware of something moving far down among the trees that fringed the
shore of the lake. The first impression produced on me was of two gray
shadows winding their way slowly toward me between the trunks of the
trees. By fine degrees the shadows assumed a more and more marked
outline, until they presented themselves in the likeness of two robed
figures, one taller than the other. While they glided nearer and nearer,
their gray obscurity of hue melted away. They brightened softly with an
inner light of their own as they slowly approached the open space before
the door. For the third time I stood in the ghostly presence of Mrs.
Van Brandt; and with her, holding her hand, I beheld a second apparition
never before revealed to me, the apparition of her child.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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