It was not long before she saw the same figure there again, close now, and in the full light.

Her hands dropped nerveless upon her knee; she sat gazing with strained whitened face.

The outline of the clothes she associated with the thought of Toyner, but from under the dark hat her father's face looked at her.

Not the face of a man she thought, but the face of a spirit, as white as if it were lifeless, as haggard as if it were dead, but with blazing life in the eyeballs and a line like red fire round their rims.

In a moment it was gone again.
Ann started up possessed with the desire to prove the ghostly visitant material; passing through the door, she fled outside with her lamp.
Whatever had been there had withdrawn itself more quickly than she had come to seek it.
She felt convinced now that her father was dead; she fell to imagining all the ways in which the tragic end might have come.