One night, two or three weeks after the bridal return, when the boy was gone to bed, Rhoda sat a long time over the turf ashes that she had raked out in front of her to extinguish them.

She contemplated so intently the new wife, as presented to her in her mind's eye over the embers, that she forgot the lapse of time.

At last, wearied with her day's work, she too retired.
But the figure which had occupied her so much during this and the previous days was not to be banished at night.

For the first time Gertrude Lodge visited the supplanted woman in her dreams.

Rhoda Brook dreamed--since her assertion that she really saw, before falling asleep, was not to be believed--that the young wife, in the pale silk dress and white bonnet, but with features shockingly distorted, and wrinkled as by age, was sitting upon her chest as she lay.