She could fancy—oh, how easily!—that she saw Rhoda, as she had often seen her, tripping along the causeway, with her bonny, merry face, and her dancing feet. But she knew well it was only a trick her memory was playing. The fold lay all silent and deserted beneath her watchful eyes, with every door safely closed, and the gate at the far end locked. Everything was precisely the same as usual.
She was almost dozing in her chair, when all at once she felt her flesh creep, and her heart throb more violently than ever. A black form was stirring, creeping slowly under the walls of the barn, and seemed to be holding itself up by the empty spaces where the bricks had been left out in the building of it. It moved so gradually that it hardly seemed to come closer to the house; and yet it stole on nearer and nearer, a tall, thin, creeping shadow in the midnight gloom. To Aunt Priscilla it appeared to be hours, though it could only have been some minutes, before the shape reached the house-door, and sunk down out of sight on the threshold, under the shadow of the little pent-roof over the doorway. She could no longer see it without opening her window and stretching out her head. It was there, just out of sight; and it seemed more terrifying to her than while she could watch its languid and ghostlike progress.
She sat motionless, with no power to move. Poor Rhoda! poor little child, whom she had loved so fondly! Not escaped from her misery, even though she was dead; but wandering, a lost and restless spirit, about her old home! A rush of troubled tenderness flooded Aunt Priscilla's heart.
"God help me!" she breathed half aloud. "I never wished her harm like this; I'll speak to her; I'll call to her. Perhaps she's something to say, and can't rest till she's said it. Oh! my poor, poor girl!"
Trembling all over, she unlatched her casement and swung it back on its rusty hinges, which creaked loudly in the utter stillness. The dark heap on the threshold stirred a little; and Aunt Priscilla called to it in a very low, quivering, and sorrowful voice—
"Rhoda!"
"Yes, aunty," came the answer, in a tone so hollow and faint that she could hardly be sure whether it had been spoken, or that she had fancied it.
"Why do you come to trouble us like this?" asked Aunt Priscilla.