And gradually as it had come the vision melted, but Deborah still continued to sit up in bed.
“I wonder what the angels were about to let him get in,” she thought, her heart still beating hard. “And when I said ‘Jesus Christ’ he never moved a bit. But he hadn’t any horns as they always give him in the pictures. I wonder how I knew it was the devil. I expect because he looked so horribly dark and bad. I’d best sit up for fear he returns.”
She sat up, and some time afterwards she heard her father coming to bed. She called him in just to have the light turned up and see a human being again, and after that she lay down and slept peacefully.
Still, though Deborah remembered the scene for ever after she never by any chance mentioned it to anyone.
“They would only say I imagined it,” she said, “and laugh at me for believing in a ghost. Besides, if I did tell them they wouldn’t understand, as it wasn’t a ghost.”
And after a time the incident slipped back into the dim recesses of her memory, only to be called back at a later date.
CHAPTER VIII
Two years had passed away, and the January of the third had begun. The scene was once again upon the hillside, a bright starlit night in January 1889. But the same miserable wind of two years back was moaning through the trees, and well it might.
On the broken seat sat Genius all alone, his head bent in his hands, unconscious of the wind, the cold, the night.
Whilst he sat thus thoughtful Plucritus glided silent on the scene. The blood-red light from the blood-red ring shone round about him in glorious, feverish light. There was nothing dull nor dark about it now.