herself whether it was time to give place to her advancing sister, the
morning. Mrs. Mary Dodds rose to answer the knock, and Thomas listened
with natural curiosity to know who the early visitor was, and what was
wanted. He heard a suppressed scream of fear from his wife, and the next
moment she came rushing into the room; yet the never a word she uttered,
and her lips were so white and dry that you might have supposed that her
silence was the result of organic inability. Nor even when she got into
bed again, and tried to hide her head with the bed-clothes, did her
terror diminish, or her lips become more obedient to the feeling within;
so that Thomas knew not what to think, except it was that she had seen a
ghost--not an unnatural supposition at a time when occult causes and
spiritual appearances were as undoubted as the phenomena of the electric
telegraph are in our day. But he was not destined to be left many
minutes more in ignorance of the cause of Mrs. Mary Dodds's terror, for,
upon listening, he heard some one come into the kitchen, and bolt the
door on the inside--so much for his ears; then he turned his eyes to the
kitchen, into which he could, as well as the light of the grey dawn
would permit, see from where he lay; and what did he see?

"How comes it? whence this mimic shape?
In look and lineament so like our kind.
You might accost the spectral thing, and say,
'Good e'en t'ye.'"

No other than the figure of Mrs. Janet Dodds herself. Yes, there she was
in her old grey dress, busy taking off that plaid which Thomas knew so
well, and hanging the same upon the peg, where she had hung it so often
for five long years. Thomas was now as completely deprived of the power
of speech as she who lay, equally criminal as himself, alongside of him;
but able at least to look, or rather, unable to shut their eyes, they