Then he, too, emerged from revery as the twilight had from its sombreness, and faced clearly the new thought that glowed upon him like the large, sweet moon so dreamily brooding in the sky. Suddenly he was aware of a shape looming up in the faint moonlight not far from him; the form of a woman, half of whose body was concealed by a curve of the ground, in such a way that it might have been thought she was just rising out of the earth. The woman was looking seaward. She did not observe his presence. Such an apparition would, in any case, have given pause to a preoccupied man upon whom it came without warning; but there was a special reason why it should affect Lance in an extraordinary manner. Her face offered itself to him in profile, and was so irradiated by the nocturnal light that it came out clearly against the sky. Seeing it thus, Lance was instantly--I might say, appallingly--struck by its resemblance to a face he had many times seen, one that, in fact, he had been thinking about only a little while before. The face was like a darker profile of Jessie Floyd, touched with moonlight. At first, of course, Lance thought that he must be suffering from hallucination; that the day's exposure to the sun had affected his brain and brought out in a visible form the thought of Jessie, which had been so constantly with him. But the unknown woman stirred, and he saw that she was real. Hereupon he scanned her more carefully, guessing that at least the resemblance which he traced was an illusion. No; it remained intact. He could not get rid of it. Clearly, the resemblance was real, no less than the woman. I have hinted that Lance was of a modestly scientific turn; but he also had in his constitution many susceptibilities whereof science as yet knows little, and the phenomenon so abruptly thrust upon his notice stirred these susceptibilities to their depths. He did not at all know what to make of it. A fear crossed him that he was becoming as superstitious as the ignorant folk on whom he had lately shed the balm of his pity. What did this strange presence and resemblance mean or portend? Was there not some omen hidden in them?