ridge fell----?" She remembered that she had screamed,
"My Joseph! My boy!" and then had found herself in the parlor, the body
laid out on the couch.

She remembered suddenly that the parlor had seemed to contain the
presence of Jim. She had looked up to see dimly what seemed the figure
and face of her dead husband. In the eyes that seemed to be laughing she
read the threat, "I took him, but now there's you."

As these recollections flooded and flowed through her mind, a frightened
nervousness seized upon Martha, standing by the window. Somehow she was
being held by a fear to move. Something seemed to have robbed her of the
strength and resolution to turn from the window.

There came to her the impression that there was some one in the room
with her. The feeling grew subtly upon her and added to her fear of
turning around. So she kept her eyes looking out of the window up at
where the shaft of the gravestone stood. But, more clearly now than
before, she sensed something that seemed to reach out from the
gravestone and carry to her, and at the same time there grew the feeling
that the presence in the room was approaching her.

She was held in fright. All her nervous impulses impelled her to flight.
Like a whip that was descending over her head, came the mirage from the
gravestone until, in a mad, wild attempt to evade it, she flung about in
the room as if to dash across and away from the window. Suddenly she was
halted in her passage by the presence of Jim. The dim parlor was somehow
filled with a sense of his being there, and in the dusk near the
mantelpiece and at the head of the couch, there stood in shadowy outline
her husband, come back.

"Jim!" she uttered, in a frightened gasp, and threw her hands outward to
protect herself from his purpose. But she saw clearly the shadowy face
and eyes that said unmistakably, "I have come for you."

She was terror-bound. There was no advance, for moving forward meant
coming closer to that presence, meant walking into his very grasp.

She was about to speak, to plead for herself, to beg, "Jim, leave me."

In her terror and dread of his approach, she turned hastily to the
window and leaped down. Wildly she scrambled up, bruised and shaken, and
screaming hoarsely, while in unthinking terror she moved her hands, as
if beating off unwelcome hands, she ran pantingly up the road which led
to Deems's house.

The silence and the air of happy quietness that filled the house of her