"Here is the woman you want," she sang to him. Tears of vexation and jealousy—quick as a child's—started down her face.
"Peter, boy, don't you remember? You came to me, and dropped in the hay. I sang to you in the dark, and you came."
But Peter stood in a dark house, muttering a name she had never heard. Now he was striking matches one after another, peering into the empty corners of a deserted room. Then he spoke of an attic with rafters, and again of the dripping water.
The girl looked into his vacant eyes.
"Can't you see me, Peter?"
It was someone else he saw: he talked now of her dusty frock and of a garden where he sat and waited.
The woman by the bed could not come between him and this lovely ghost. She strained Peter towards her, and put her face to his cheek.
"No, Peter; it's me that is here. Can't you feel that I am holding you?"
Her pressure started in him another disordered memory. He struggled against her, and raised himself upon an elbow. His eyes looked quite through her. He saw her in his brain, but he did not see her in the room before him. The girl shuddered to hear him struggling with a mirage of herself. He was back in the loft. At first she thought it was the sight of her visibly before him in the room that caused him to speak of her. She drew back, and with a shudder saw he was talking to the air.