Miss Blake caught her breath in a struggling gasp of dread as to what would come next.
"Tall and thin and lanky, with hair all dragged into that ugly little hard knob at the back of her head!"
The ghost paused, and its uneasy hands clasped each other convulsively while it showed plainly that it was confused in its mind and struggling to grasp a thought it could not express.
Miss Blake breathed a deep sigh of relief. She had really begun to suspect that it was a vision of herself that was haunting Nan in her nightmare. Of course now she knew better. For surely she was not "tall and lanky," and her hair was certainly not "dragged into an ugly little knob at the back of her head." How grateful she was it had not proved to be herself.
"O father! her eyes are like needles."
Miss Blake could have shouted for joy. But who could this awful bugbear be?
"They prick me when she looks! Save me! Save me! my heart will break if some one doesn't come and rescue me from this terrible person. Take her away! She's coming at me with her needly eyes! Daddy! Daddy!"
The uneasy spirit rocked backward and forward in the intensity of its emotion. It stretched out its arms and wagged a threatening forefinger, while it mumbled some unintelligible warning in a voice that faltered and wavered, and then frayed off to a mere wheeze that sounded suspiciously like a snore.
Miss Blake would have risen if she had dared, but she dreaded the effect even the slightest shock might have upon Nan, in what she never doubted was a somnambulistic trance. But when the white-robed figure turned slowly about and retraced its steps to the threshold, she started up and noiselessly followed after to make sure that the girl arrived safely in her own bed and showed no sign of further wandering that night.
Never was a passage from room to room made more deliberately, and when the bed was reached the phantom scrambled into it, dragged the blankets closely about her shoulders and with a sigh of satisfaction settled herself to slumber.