The thing stood between her and the window, stiff and white. It showed its face, and the face was white, too. It was Angelo Reanda. She knew it, though there seemed to be no eyes in the white thing. She felt its dead voice speaking to her.
"An evil death on you and all your house," it said.
The face was gone again, but the thing was still there. Very, very slowly, stiff and white, it lay back, straight from the heel upwards, unbending as it sank, till it laid itself upon the floor, and she was staring at the joints of the bricks in the moonlight.
Then she shrieked aloud and awoke. The moonlight had moved a foot or more, and she knew that she had been asleep.
"It was only a dream," she said to Griggs in the morning. "I thought I saw you dead, dear. It frightened me."
"I am not dead yet," he laughed. "It was that salad—there were potatoes in it."
She turned away; for the contrast between the triviality of what he said and the horror of what she had felt brought an expression to her face which even her consummate art could not have concealed.
The impression lasted all day, and when she went to bed she carefully closed the shutters so that the moonlight should not fall upon the floor. The dream did not return.
"It must have been the salad," said Griggs, when she told him that she had not been disturbed again.
But Gloria was thinking of death, and his words jarred upon her horribly, as a trivial jest would jar on a condemned man walking from his cell to the scaffold. In the evening Griggs went by the diligence to Rome, and Gloria was left alone with her child and the nurse.