At the moment when she raised her hand to the candle, she heard the stillness of the Banqueting-Hall shudder with the terror of a sound—­a sound faint and momentary, like the distant rushing of the wind.

The sliding door in the drawing-room had moved.

Which way had it moved?  Had an unknown hand pushed it back in its socket further than she had pushed it, or pulled it to again, and closed it?  The horror of being shut out all night, by some undiscoverable agency, from the life of the house, was stronger in her than the horror of looking across the Banqueting-Hall.  She made desperately for the door of the room.

It had fallen to silently after her when she had come in, but it was not closed.  She pulled it open, and looked.

The sight that met her eyes rooted her, panic-stricken, to the spot.

Close to the first of the row of windows, counting from the drawing-room, and full in the gleam of it, she saw a solitary figure.  It stood motionless, rising out of the furthest strip of moonlight on the floor.  As she looked, it suddenly disappeared.  In another instant she saw it again, in the second strip of moonlight—­lost it again—­saw it in the third strip—­lost it once more—­and saw it in the fourth.  Moment by moment it advanced, now mysteriously lost in the shadow, now suddenly visible again in the light, until it reached the fifth and nearest strip of moonlight.  There it paused, and strayed aside slowly to the middle of the Hall.  It stopped at the tripod, and stood, shivering audibly in the silence, with its hands raised over the dead ashes, in the action of warming them at a fire.  It turned back again, moving down the path of the moonlight, stopped at the fifth window, turned once more, and came on softly through the shadow straight to the place where Magdalen stood.

Her voice was dumb, her will was helpless.  Every sense in her but the seeing sense was paralyzed.  The seeing sense—­held fast in the fetters of its own terror—­looked unchangeably straightforward, as it had looked from the first.  There she stood in the door-way, full in the path of the figure advancing on her through the shadow, nearer and nearer, step by step.

It came close.

The bonds of horror that held her burst asunder when it was within arm’s-length.  She started back.  The light of the candle on the table fell full on its face, and showed her—­Admiral Bartram.

A long, gray dressing-gown was wrapped round him.  His head was uncovered; his feet were bare.  In his left hand he carried his little basket of keys.  He passed Magdalen slowly, his lips whispering without intermission, his open eyes staring straight before him with the glassy stare of death.  His eyes revealed to her the terrifying truth.  He was walking in his sleep.

The terror of seeing him as she saw him now was not the terror she had felt when her eyes first lighted on him—­an apparition in the moon-light, a specter in the ghostly Hall.  This time she could struggle against the shock; she could feel the depth of her own fear.