Not caring to disturb the comfort of the animals, I sat for an hour and smoked a pipe…
listening to the creaks and groans of the house, devising explanations for their presence, admiring the artful curves of the lilies in the molding, and feeling at once soothed and unnerved.
Then I rose, checked to see if my clammy boots had begun to dry before the waning flames, and succeeded in coaxing the spaniel to feast on the remains of my supper.
As I kneeled before the hearth, tapping the ashes from my pipe onto the embers, the spry old tom reclined in my chair, his green eyes illuminated by the candelabra, regarding the ravenous pup with an expression of fond disdain.
Once Emma lapped the last morsel from the plate, I patted her head, snuffed each constituent of the candelabra, seized a solitary candlestick, and the furred pair and I retired to the bedchamber, where I locked the door and prepared for sleep.
When at last I parted the curtains of the canopy bed, Emma leapt onto the platform and all but crushed the Admiral, who, simultaneously jumping abed, hissed indignantly, but would not be thwarted in his own pursuit of comfort and rest.
The long day’s events had exhausted me, and I fell asleep before closing the curtains or snuffing the candle.
I woke some time later — the candle had burned down perhaps an inch — aware of the need to blow out the light, and faintly put off by a sense of something strange.
It was the precognitive sensation that made the sight such a shock.
That what I had felt before I opened my eyes was actually there, that it was real, that it was visible, was what made me drop the candle to the floor.
In the moment before that breathless blunder, there was a woman at my bedside.
As I held the flame in her direction, she passed toward the window.
She was dressed head to heel in white, in a large sunhat and a wide-skirted dress, as if for a summer excursion out of doors.
She glided toward the window in the instant before the candle fell.
When I succeeded in relighting the flame, she was gone.
The House on the Lake 