beneath this milky colour and from the heart of the whirling film, there
began to gleam an underlying brilliance after the fashion of the light
in an opal, but with this difference, that the light here was blue--
a steel blue so vivid that the pain of it forced me to shut my eyes.
When I opened them again, this light had increased in intensity.
The disturbance in the glass began to abate; the eddies revolved more
slowly; the smoke-wreaths faded: and as they died wholly out, the blue
light went out on a sudden and the mirror looked down upon me as before.

That is to say, I thought so for a moment. But the next, I found that
though its face reflected the room in which I sat, there was one
omission.

_I_ was that omission. My arm-chair was there, but no one sat in it.

I was surprised; but, as well as I can recollect, not in the least
frightened. I continued, at any rate, to gaze steadily into the glass,
and now took note of two particulars that had escaped me. The table I
saw was laid for two. Forks, knives and glasses gleamed at either end,
and a couple of decanters caught the sparkle of the candles in the
centre. This was my first observation. The second was that the colours
of the hearth-rug had gained in freshness, and that a dark spot just
beyond it--a spot which in my first exploration I had half-amusedly
taken for a blood-stain--was not reflected in the glass.

As I leant back and gazed, with my hands in my lap, I remember there was
some difficulty in determining whether the tune by which I was still
haunted ran in my head or was tinkling from within the old spinet by the
window. But after a while the music, whencesoever it came, faded away
and ceased. A dead silence held everything for about thirty seconds.