By twelve o`clock of this particular night he was asleep, however, and by two had waked again. The moon by this time had shifted to a position on the western side of the house, and it now shone in through the windows of the living-room and those of the kitchen beyond.
A certain combination of furniture a chair near a table, with his coat on it, the half-open kitchen door casting a shadow, and the position of a lamp near a paper gave him an exact representation of Phoebe leaning over the table as he had often seen her do in life. It gave him a great start. Could it be she or her ghost? He had scarcely ever believed in spirits; and still he looked at her fixedly in the feeble half-light, his old hair tingling oddly at the roots, and then sat up.
The figure did not move. He put his thin legs out of the bed and sat looking at her, wondering if this could really be Phoebe. They had talked of ghosts often in their lifetime, of apparitions and omens; but they had never agreed that such things could be.
It had never been a part of his wife`s creed that she could have a spirit that could return to walk the earth. Her after-world was quite a different affair, a vague heaven, no less, from which the righteous did not trouble to return. Yet here she was now, bending over the table in her black skirt and gray shawl, her pale profile outlined against the moonlight.
“Phoebe,” he called, thrilling from head to toe and putting out one bony hand, “have yuh come back?”
Uncertainly Door
The figure did not stir, and he arose and walked uncertainly to the door, looking at it fixedly the while. As he drew near, however, the apparition resolved itself into its primal content his old coat over the high-backed chair, the lamp by the paper, the half-open door.
“Well,” he said to himself, his mouth open, “I thought shore I saw her.” And he ran his hand strangely and vaguely through his hair, the while his nervous tension relaxed. Vanished as it had, it gave him the idea that she might return.
Another night, because of this first illusion, and because his mind was now constantly on her and he was old, he looked out of the window that was nearest his bed and commanded a hen-coop and pig-pen and a part of the wagon-shed, and there, a faint mist exuding from the damp of the ground, he thought he saw her again.
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