“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 wise words without getting at their real sense, and, what is worse, without suspecting our own ignorance?”

“I know it well.”

“When Henrietta used to say that the whirl of worldly occupations and interests and amusements in which I was so engrossed did not deserve to be called life, and could never satisfy the eternal soul within me, it used to seem to me an exaggerated way of saying that the next world would be better than this one; but I saw the meaning of her words, I saw the truth of them, as I see these flowers before me, and feel the gravel under my feet:  it came to me in a moment, the night these terrible eyes looked into mine.  The feeling did not last, but I have never forgotten it, and never shall.  It was as if a veil were lifted for an instant, and I was standing outside of my life and looking back at it; and it seemed so poor and worthless and unreal—­I can’t explain myself properly.”

“And did the figure remain for any time?”

“I do not know.  I think I must have fainted.  They found me lying in a half-unconscious state in my chair when they came home.  I was ill in bed for weeks with what the doctors call low fever.  But neither the fever nor anything else could remove the impression that had been made.  That terrible thing was a blessed messenger to me.  My real conversion was not till years later, but the way was prepared by the great shock I then received, and which roused me to a sense of my danger.”