After waiting a while, he drew back.  “She’s more like a child than a woman to-night,” he muttered to himself under his breath.  He glanced across the room at Hester Dethridge.  The lighted candle which she had brought up stairs with her was burning near the place where she stood.  “Blow it out,” he whispered.  She never moved.  He repeated the direction.  There she stood, deaf to him.

What was she doing?  She was looking fixedly into one of the corners of the room.

He turned his head again toward the hollowed place in the wall.  He looked at the peaceful face on the pillow once more.  He deliberately revived his own vindictive sense of the debt that he owed her.  “But for you,” he whispered to himself, “I should have won the race:  but for you, I should have been friends with my father:  but for you, I might marry Mrs. Glenarm.”  He turned back again into the room while the sense of it was at its fiercest in him.  He looked round and round him.  He took up a towel; considered for a moment; and threw it down again.

A new idea struck him.  In two steps he was at the side of his bed.  He seized on one of the pillows, and looked suddenly at Hester.  “It’s not a drunken brute, this time,” he said to her.  “It’s a woman who will fight for her life.  The pillow’s the safest of the two.”  She never answered him, and never looked toward him.  He made once more for the place in the wall; and stopped midway between it and his bed—­stopped, and cast a backward glance over his shoulder.

Hester Dethridge was stirring at last.

With no third person in the room, she was looking, and moving, nevertheless, as if she was following a third person along the wall, from the corner.  Her lips were parted in horror; her eyes, opening wider and wider, stared rigid and glittering at the empty wall.  Step by step she stole nearer and nearer to Geoffrey, still following some visionary Thing, which was stealing nearer and nearer, too.  He asked himself what it meant.  Was the terror of the deed that he was about to do more than the woman’s brain could bear?  Would she burst out screaming, and wake his wife?

He hurried to the place in the wall—­to seize the chance, while the chance was his.

He steadied his strong hold on the pillow.

He stooped to pass it through the opening.

He poised it over Anne’s sleeping face.

At the same moment he felt Hester Dethridge’s hand laid on him from behind.  The touch ran through him, from head to foot, like a touch of ice.  He drew back with a start, and faced her.  Her eyes were staring straight over his shoulder at something behind him—­looking as they had looked in the garden at Windygates.

Before he could speak he felt the flash of her eyes in his eyes.  For the third time, she had seen the Apparition behind him.  The homicidal frenzy possessed her.  She flew at his throat like a wild beast.  The feeble old woman attacked the athlete!