about, seeking the source of the rapidly broadening light. As he
did so, his shadow turned and lay along the road in front of him as
before. The light still came from behind him. That was surprising;
he could not understand. Again he turned, and again, facing
successively to every point of the horizon. Always the shadow was
before--always the light behind, "a still and awful red."

Holt was astonished--"dumfounded" is the word that he used in
telling it--yet seems to have retained a certain intelligent
curiosity. To test the intensity of the light whose nature and
cause he could not determine, he took out his watch to see if he
could make out the figures on the dial. They were plainly visible,
and the hands indicated the hour of eleven o'clock and twenty-five
minutes. At that moment the mysterious illumination suddenly flared
to an intense, an almost blinding splendor, flushing the entire sky,
extinguishing the stars and throwing the monstrous shadow of himself
athwart the landscape. In that unearthly illumination he saw near
him, but apparently in the air at a considerable elevation, the
figure of his wife, clad in her night-clothing and holding to her
breast the figure of his child. Her eyes were fixed upon his with
an expression which he afterward professed himself unable to name or
describe, further than that it was "not of this life."

The flare was momentary, followed by black darkness, in which,
however, the apparition still showed white and motionless; then by
insensible degrees it faded and vanished, like a bright image on the
retina after the closing of the eyes. A peculiarity of the
apparition, hardly noted at the time, but afterward recalled, was
that it showed only the upper half of the woman's figure: nothing
was seen below the waist.