The book on the piano ledge before him was Mendelssohn’s _Lieder ohne Worte_ open as Effie had left it at Number Nine. He remembered that was the one his mother had loved so much. His fingers fell of their own accord into the prelude, into the melody, pressing out its thick, sweet, deliberate sadness. It wounded him, each note a separate stab, yet he went on, half-voluptuously enjoying the self-inflicted pain, trying to work it up and up into a supreme poignancy of sorrow, of regret. As he stopped on the closing chord he heard somewhere behind him a thick, sobbing sigh. “Effie—” He looked round. But Effie was not there. He could hear her footsteps in the room overhead. She had gone, then, before he had stopped playing, shutting the door without a sound. It must have been his imagination. He played a few bars, then paused, listening. The sighing had begun again; it was close behind him. He swung round sharply. There was nobody there. But the door, which had been shut a minute ago, stood wide open. A cold wind blew in, cutting through the hot, stagnant air. He got up and shut the door. The cold wind wrapped him in a belt, a swirl; he stood still in it for a moment, stiff with fear. When he crossed the room to the piano it was as if he moved breast high in deep, cold water. Somewhere in the secret place of his mind a word struggled to form itself, to be born. “Mother.” It came to him with a sense of appalling, supernatural horror. Horror that was there with him in the room like a presence. “Mother.” The word had lost its meaning. It stood for nothing but that horror. He tried to play again, but his fingers, slippery with sweat, dropped from the keyboard. Something compelled him to turn round and look towards his mother’s chair. Then he saw her. She stood between him and the chair, straight and thin, dressed in the clothes she had died in, the yellowish flannel nightgown and bed jacket. [Illustration: The apparition maintained itself with difficulty.] The apparition maintained itself with difficulty. Already its hair had grown indistinct, a cap of white mist. Its face was an insubstantial framework for its mouth and eyes, and for the tears that fell in two shining tracks between. It was less a form than a visible emotion, an anguish. Hollyer stood up and stared at it. Through the glasses of its tears it gazed back at him with an intense, a terrible reproach and sorrow. Then, slowly and stiffly, it began to recede from him, drawn back and back, without any movement of its feet, in an unearthly stillness, keeping up, to the last minute, its look of indestructible reproach. And now it was a formless mass that drifted to the window and hung there a second, and passed, shrinking like a breath on the pane.