But she was not a
woman to lay down her arms upon the inroad of a vague terror. She
quietly rose, and, saying to herself it must be one of the pigeons
that haunted the balcony, laid her work on the table, and went to
the window. As she drew one of the curtains a little aside to peep,
the tap was plainly and hurriedly though softly repeated, and at
once she swept it back. There was the dim shadow of a man's head
upon the blind, cast there by an old withered moon low in the west!
Perhaps it was something in the shape of the shadow that made her
pull up the blind so hurriedly, and yet with something of the awe
with which we take "the face-cloth from the face." Yes, there was a
face!--frightful, not as that of a corpse, but as that of a spectre
from whose soul the scars of his mortal end have never passed away.
Helen did not scream--her throat seemed to close and her heart to
cease. But her eyes continued movelessly fixed on the face even
after she knew it was the face of her brother, and the eyes of the
face kept staring back into hers through the glass with such a look
of concentrated eagerness that they seemed no more organs of vision,
but caves of hunger, nor was there a movement of the lips towards
speech.
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