It must have been soon after midnight when he heard the door-knob turning very slowly and softly. The door opened behind him and Pauline came in, moving without a sound, and stood before him. It gave him a shock; for he had been thinking of Rosamund, and when he heard the door-knob turn it was the phantasm of Rosamund that he expected to see coming in. He says, for the first minute, it was this appearance of Pauline that struck him as the uncanny and unnatural thing. She had nothing, absolutely nothing on but a transparent white chiffony sort of dressing-gown. She was trying to undo it. He could see her hands shaking as her fingers fumbled with the fastenings. He got up suddenly, and they just stood there before each other, saying nothing, staring at each other. He was fascinated by her, by the sheer glamour of her body, gleaming white through the thin stuff, and by the movement of her fingers. I think I’ve said she was a beautiful woman, and her beauty at that moment was overpowering. And still he stared at her without saying anything. It sounds as if their silence lasted quite a long time, but in reality it couldn’t have been more than some fraction of a second. Then she began. “Oh, Edward, for God’s sake say something. Oughtn’t I to have come?” And she went on without waiting for an answer. “Are you thinking of _her_? Because, if—if you are, I’m not going to let her drive you away from me.... I’m not going to.... She’ll keep on coming as long as we don’t— Can’t you see that this is the way to stop it...? When you take me in your arms.” She slipped off the loose sleeves of the chiffon thing and it fell to her feet. Marston says he heard a queer sound, something between a groan and a grunt, and was amazed to find that it came from himself. He hadn’t touched her yet—mind you, it went quicker than it takes to tell, it was still an affair of the fraction of a second—they were holding out their arms to each other, when the door opened again without a sound, and, without visible passage, the phantasm was there. It came incredibly fast, and thin at first, like a shaft of light sliding between them. It didn’t do anything; there was no beating of hands, only, as it took on its full form, its perfect likeness of flesh and blood, it made its presence felt like a push, a force, driving them asunder. Pauline hadn’t seen it yet. She thought it was Marston who was beating her back. She cried out: “Oh, don’t, don’t push me away!” She stooped below the phantasm’s guard and clung to his knees, writhing and crying. For a moment it was a struggle between her moving flesh and that still, supernatural being. And in that moment Marston realized that he hated Pauline. She was fighting Rosamund with her gross flesh and blood, taking a mean advantage of her embodied state to beat down the heavenly, discarnate thing. He called to her to let go. “It’s not I,” he shouted. “Can’t you _see_ her?”