in
silence on our drive home.

The sketch-book lay open on my knee. My eyes were fastened on it; my
mind was absorbed in recalling the moment when the apparition beckoned
me into the summer-house and spoke. Putting the words and the writing
together, the conclusion was too plain to be mistaken. The woman whom I
had saved from drowning had need of me again.

And this was the same woman who, in her own proper person, had not
hesitated to seize the first opportunity of leaving the house in which
we had been sheltered together--without stopping to say one grateful
word to the man who had preserved her from death! Four days only had
elapsed since she had left me, never (to all appearance) to see me
again. And now the ghostly apparition of her had returned as to a tried
and trusted friend; had commanded me to remember her and to go to her;
and had provided against all possibility of my memory playing me false,
by writing the words which invited me to meet her "when the full moon
shone on Saint Anthony's Well."

What had happened in the interval? What did the supernatural manner of
her communication with me mean? What ought my next course of action to
be?

My mother roused me from my reflections. She stretched out her hand, and
suddenly closed the open book on my knee, as if the sight of the writing
in it were unendurable to her.

"Why don't you speak to me, George?" she said. "Why do you keep your
thoughts to yourself?"

"My mind is lost in confusion," I answered. "I can suggest nothing and
explain nothing. My thoughts are all bent on the one question of what
I am to do next. On that point I believe I may say that my mind is made
up." I touched the sketch-book as I spoke. "Come what may of it," I
said, "I mean to keep the appointment."

My mother looked at me as if she doubted the evidence of her own senses.

"He talks as if it were a real thing!" she exclaimed. "George, you don't
really believe that you saw somebody in the summer-house? The place was
empty. I tell you positively, when you pointed into the summer-house,
the place was empty. You have been thinking and thinking of this woman
till you persuade yourself that you have actually seen her."

I opened the sketch-book again. "I thought I saw her writing on this
page," I answered. "Look at it, and tell me if I was wrong."

My mother refused to look at it. Steadily as she persisted in taking the
rational view, nevertheless the writing frightened her.

"It i