She advanced to the table and, resting her two hands on it, drew a deep breath. “Let me see,” she said, as if forcing herself to a hateful effort.

            Charlotte felt the contagion of her whiteness. “She knows,” she thought. She pushed the letter across the table. Her mother-in-law lowered her head over it in silence, but without touching it with her pale wrinkled hands.

            Charlotte stood watching her as she herself, when she had tried to read the letter, had been watched by Mrs. Ashby. The latter fumbled for her glasses, held them to her eyes, and bent still closer to the outspread page, in order, as it seemed, to avoid touching it. The light of the lamp fell directly on her old face, and Charlotte reflected what depths of the unknown may lurk under the clearest and most candid lineaments. She had never seen her mother-in-law’s features express any but simple and sound emotions—cordiality, amusement, a kindly sympathy; now and again a flash of wholesome anger. Now they seemed to wear a look of fear and hatred, of incredulous dismay and almost cringing defiance. It was as if the spirits warring within her had distorted her face to their own likeness. At length she raised her head. “I can’t—I can’t,” she said in a voice of childish distress.

            “You can’t make it out either?”

            She shook her head, and Charlotte saw two tears roll down her cheeks.

            “Familiar as the writing is to you?” Charlotte insisted with twitching lips.

            Mrs. Ashby did not take up the challenge. “I can make out nothing—nothing.”

            “But you do know the writing?”

            Mrs. Ashby lifted her head timidly; her anxious eyes stole with a glance of apprehension around the quiet familiar room. “How can I tell? I was startled at first…”

            “Startled by the resemblance?”

            “Well, I thought—”

            “You’d better say it out, mother! You knew at once it was her writing?”

            “Oh, wait, my dear—wait.”

            “Wait for what?”

            Mrs. Ashby looked up; her eyes, travelling slowly past Charlotte, were lifted to the blank wall behind her son’s writing table.

            Charlotte, following the glance, burst into a shrill laugh of accusation. “I needn’t wait any longer! You’ve answered me now! You’re looking straight at the wall where her picture used to hang!”

            Mrs. Ashby lifted her hand with a murmur of warning. “Sh-h.”

            “Oh, you needn’t imagine that anything can ever frighten me again!” Charlotte cried.

            Her mother-in-law still leaned against the table. Her lips moved plaintively. “But we’re going mad—we’re both going mad. We both know such things are impossible.”

            Her daughter-in-law looked at her with a pitying stare. “I’ve known for a long time now that everything was possible.”

            “Even this?”

            “Yes, exactly this.”

            “But this letter—after all, there’s nothing in this letter—”

            “Perhaps there would be to him. How can I tell? I remember his saying to me once that if you were used to a handwriting the faintest stroke of it became legible. Now I see what he meant. He was used to it.”

            “But the few strokes that I can make out are so pale. No one could possibly read that letter.”

            Charlotte laughed again. “I suppose everything’s pale about a ghost,” she said stridently.

            “Oh, my child—my child—don’t say it!”

            “Why shouldn’t I say it, when even the bare walls cry it out? What difference does it make if her letters are illegible to you and me? If even you can see her face on that blank wall, why shouldn’t he read her writing on this blank paper? Don’t you see that she’s everywhere in this house, and the closer to him because to everyone else she’s become invisible?” Charlotte dropped into a chair and covered her face with her hands. A turmoil of sobbing shook her from head to foot. At length a touch on her shoulder made her look up, and she saw her mother-in-law bending over her. Mrs. Ashby’s face seemed to have grown still smaller and more wasted, but it had resumed its usual quiet look.