by a sign entreating her not to be uneasy about me, but I could
do no more. I was absorbed, body and soul, in the one desire to
look at the sketch-book. As certainly as I had seen the woman, so
certainly I had seen her, with my pencil in her hand, writing in
my book.

I advanced to the table on which the book was lying open. I
looked at the blank space on the lower part of the page, under
the foreground lines of my unfinished drawing. My mother,
following me, looked at the page too.

There was the writing! The woman had disappeared, but there were
her written words left behind her: visible to my mother as well
as to me, readable by my mother's eyes as well as by mine!

These were the words we saw, arranged in two lines, as I copy
them here:

When the full moon shines
On Saint Anthony's Well.


CHAPTER IX.

NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL.

I POINTED to the writing in the sketch book, and looked at my
mother. I was not mistaken. She _had_ seen it, as I had seen it.
But she refused to acknowledge that anything had happened to
alarm her--plainly as I could detect it in her face.

"Somebody has been playing a trick on you, George," she said.

I made no reply. It was needless to say anything. My poor mother
was evidently as far from being satisfied with her own shallow
explanation as I was. The carriage waited for us at the door. We
set forth in silence on our drive home.

The sketch-book lay open on my knee. My eyes were fastened on it;
my mind was absorbed in recalling the moment when the apparition
beckoned me into the summer-house and spoke. Putting the words
and the writing together, the conclusion was too plain to be
mistaken. The woman whom I had saved from drowning had need of me
again.

And this was the same woman who, in her own proper person, had
not hesitated to seize the first opportunity of leaving the house
in which we had been sheltered together--without stopping to say
one grateful word to the man who had preserved her from death!
Four days only had elapsed since she had left me, never (to all
appearance) to see me again. And now the ghostly apparition of
her had returned as to a tried and trusted friend; had commanded
me to remember her and to go to her; and had provided against all
possibility of my memory playing me false, by writing the words
which invited me to meet her "when the full moon shone on Saint
Anthony's Well."

What had happened in the interval? What did the supernatural
manner of her communication with me mean? What ought my next
course of action to be?

My mother roused me from my reflections. She stretched out her
hand, and suddenly closed the open book on my knee, as if the
sight of the writing in it were unendurable to her.

"Why don't you speak to me, George?" she said. "Why do you keep
your thoughts to yourself?"

"My mind is lost in confusion," I answered. "I can suggest
nothing and explain nothing. My thoughts are all bent on the one
question of what I am to do next. On that point I believe I may
say that my mind is made up." I touched the sketch-book as I
spoke. "Come what may of it," I said, "I mean to keep the
appointment."

My mother looked at me as if she doubted the evidence of her own
senses.

"He talks as if it were a real thing!" she exclaimed. "George,
you don't really believe that you saw somebody in the
summer-house? The place was empty. I tell you positively, when
you pointed into the summer-house, the place was empty. You have
been thinking and thinking of this woman till you persuade
yourself that you have actually seen her."

I opened the sketch-book again. "I thought I saw her writing on
this page," I answered. "Look at it, and tell me if I was wrong."

My mother refused to look at it. Steadily as she persisted in
taking the rational view, nevertheless the writing frightened
her.

"It is not a week yet," she went on, "since I saw you lying
between life and death in your bed at the inn. How can you talk
of keeping the appointment, in your state of health? An
appointment with a shadowy Something in your own imagination,
which appears and disappears, and leaves substantial writing
behind it! It's ridiculous, George; I wonder you can help
laughing at yourself."



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