Making an effort over herself, she resumed her work, drawing the needle through quickly for a few minutes, and trying hard to dismiss Duncan Leslie from her thoughts. As she worked, she pictured her father seated by Van Heldre’s side; and a feeling of thankfulness came over her as she thought of the warm friendship between her elders, and of how firm and staunch Van Heldre seemed to be. Then she thought of the home troubles with her Aunt Marguerite, and her father’s patient forbearance under circumstances which were a heavy trial to his patience.
“Poor Aunt Marguerite!” she sighed, as her hands dropped with her work, and she sat gazing across the table straight out at the starry heavens. “How she loved poor Harry in her way; and yet how soon he seems to have passed out of her mind!”
She sighed as the past came back with her brother’s wilfulness and folly; but, throwing these weaknesses into the shade, there were all his frank, good qualities, his tenderness to her before the troubles seemed to wrench them apart; the happy hours they had passed with Madelaine as boy and girls together; all happy days—gone for ever, but which seemed to stand out now as parts of Harry’s life which were to be remembered to the exclusion of all that was terrible and black.
“My brother!” she breathed, as she gazed straight out seaward, and a faint smile passed her lips; “he loved me, and I could always win him over to my side.”
The thought seemed frozen in her brain, her half-closed eyes opened widely, the pupils dilated, and her lips parted more and more, as she sat there fixed to her seat, the chilly drops gathering on her white brow, and a thrill of horror coursing through her veins.
For as she looked she seemed to have conjured up the countenance of her brother, to gaze in there by the open casement—the face as she had seen it last—when he escaped from her bedroom, but not flushed and excited; it was now pale, the eyes hollow, and his hair clinging unkempt about his brow.
Was she awake, or was this some evolution of her imagination, or were those old stories true that at certain times the forms of those we loved did return to visit the scenes where they had passed their lives? This then was such a vision of the form of the brother whom she loved; and she gazed wildly, with her eyes starting, excited more than fearing, in the strange exaltation which she felt.
Then she sank back in her chair with the chill of dread now emphasised, as she gazed fixedly at the ghastly face, for she saw the lips part as if to speak, and she uttered a low, gasping sound, for from the open window came in a quick hoarse whisper,
“Louie, why don’t you speak? Are you alone?”