Gazing into the hollow blackness, all sorts of imaginable shapes seemed to start forth from vacancy--brilliant colors, stars, prisms, and dancing lights.

What boy, lying awake at night, has not amused or terrified himself by peopling the spaces around his bed with these phenomena of his own eyes?
"I say," whispered Fred Langdon, at length, clutching my hand, "don't you see things--out there--in the dark ?" "Yes, yes--Binny Wallace's face!" I added to my own nervousness by making this avowal; though for the last ten minutes I had seen little besides that star-pale face with its angelic hair and brows.

First a slim yellow circle, like the nimbus round the moon, took shape and grew sharp against the darkness; then this faded gradually, and there was the Face, wearing the same sad, sweet look it wore when he waved his hand to us across the awful water.
This optical illusion kept repeating itself.
"And I too," said Adams.

"I see it every now and then, outside there.
What wouldn't I give if it really was poor little Wallace looking in at us! O boys, how shall we dare to go back to the town without him?
I've wished a hundred times, since we've been sitting here, that I was in his place, alive or dead!" We dreaded the approach of morning as much as we longed for it.

The morning would tell us all.