She saw him on the one side, persistently as she had found him in his room, strange, shapeless, with a crumpled face and a dirty beard that seemed to be more dead than the rest of him.

On the other side she saw him as she had found him in the first days of her consciousness of the world.
He must have been "jolly" then, large and strong, laughing often, tossing her, she remembered, to the ceiling, his beard jet-black and his eyebrows bushy and overhanging.

Once that vigour, afterwards this horror.

She shook away from her last vision of him but it returned again and again, hanging about her over her shoulder like an ill-omened messenger.

And all the life between seemed to be suddenly wiped away as a sponge wipes figures off a slate.