a little, thinking. You know
the long gallery?"

"Yes."

"My room was there; so I was quite alone, for the servants slept, just
as they do now, in the opposite end of the house. But I had my dog with
me, such a dear little thing, a black-and-tan terrier. He was lying
asleep on the rug beside me. Well, all at once he got up and put his
head on one side as if he heard something, and he began barking. I only
said 'Nonsense, Totty, lie down,' and paid no more attention to him,
till some moments afterwards he made a strange kind of noise as if he
were trying to bark and was choked in some way. This made me look at
him, and then I observed that he was trembling from head to foot, and
staring in the strangest way at something behind me. I will honestly
tell you he made me feel so uncomfortable I was afraid to look round;
and still it was almost as bad to sit there and not look round, so at
last I summoned up courage and turned my head. Then I saw it."

"The ghost?"

"Yes."

"What was it like?"

"It was like a shadow, only darker, and not lying against the wall as a
shadow would do, but standing out from it in the air. It stood a little
way from me in a corner of the room. It was in the shape of a man, with
a ruff round his neck, and sleeves puffed out at the shoulders, as you
often see in old pictures; but I don't remember much about that, for at
the time I could think of nothing but the face."

"And that--?"

"That was simply dreadful. I can't tell you what it was like. I could
not have imagined it, if I had not seen it. It was the look--the look
in its eyes. After all these years it makes me tremble when I think of
it. But what I felt was not the same nervous feeling which made me
afraid to turn round. It went much deeper--indeed it went deeper than
anything in my life had ever gone before; it went right down to my soul,
in fact, and made me feel I had a soul."

She had turned quite pale.

"Yes, Mr. Lyndsay, strange as it sounds, the mere sight of that face
made me realise in an instant what I had read and heard thousands of
times, and what my mother and Henrietta had told me over and over again
about the utter nothingness of earthly aims and comforts--of what in an
ordinary way is called life. I had heard very fine sermons preached
about the same thing: 'What is our life, it is even a vapour,' and the
'vain shadow' in which we walk. Have you ever thought how we can go on
hearing and even repeating true and wis