There was a second’s awkwardness—­it was too stupid.  I remembered her injury, and by way of something to say, I enquired after it.  She thanked me; it was entirely healed now, but it might have been much worse; and there was something about the “mercy of the Lord” that I didn’t quite catch.  While telephoning, however—­London call, and my attention focused on it—­realized sharply that this was the first time I had spoken with her; also, that I had—­touched her.

It happened to be a Sunday, and the lines were clear.  I got my connection quickly, and the incident was forgotten while my thoughts went up to London.  On my way upstairs, then, the woman came back into my mind, so that I recalled other things about her—­how she seemed all over the house, in unlikely places often; how I had caught her sitting in the hall alone that night; how she was forever coming and going with her lugubrious visage and that untidy hair at the back that had made me laugh three years ago with the idea that it looked singed or burnt; and how the impression on my first arrival at The Towers was that this woman somehow kept alive, though its evidence was outwardly suppressed, the influence of her late employer and of his somber teachings.  Somewhere with her was associated the idea of punishment, vindictiveness, revenge.  I remembered again suddenly my odd notion that she sought to keep her present mistress here, a prisoner in this bleak and comfortless house, and that really, in spite of her obsequious silence, she was intensely opposed to the change of thought that had reclaimed Mabel to a happier view of life.

All this in a passing second flashed in review before me, and I discovered, or at any rate reconstructed, the real Mrs. Marsh.  She was decidedly in the Shadow.  More, she stood in the forefront of it, stealthily leading an assault, as it were, against The Towers and its occupants, as though, consciously or unconsciously, she labored incessantly to this hateful end.

I can only judge that some state of nervousness in me permitted the series of insignificant thoughts to assume this dramatic shape, and that what had gone before prepared the way and led her up at the head of so formidable a procession.  I relate it exactly as it came to me.  My nerves were doubtless somewhat on edge by now.  Otherwise I should hardly have been a prey to the exaggeration at all.  I seemed open to so many strange, impressions.

Nothing else, perhaps, can explain my ridiculous conversation with her, when, for the third time that evening, I came suddenly upon the woman half-way down the stairs, standing by an open window as if in the act of listening.  She was dressed in black, a black shawl over her square shoulders and black gloves on her big, broad hands.  Two black objects, prayer books apparently, she clasped, and on her head she wore a bonnet with shaking beads of jet.  At first I did not know her, as I came running down upon her from the landing; it was only