I got, so far as the immediate moment was concerned, away; I came straight out of the churchyard and, thinking hard, retraced my steps through the park. It seemed to me that by the time I reached the house I had made up my mind I would fly. The Sunday stillness both of the approaches and of the interior, in which I met no one, fairly excited me with a sense of opportunity. Were I to get off quickly, this way, I should get off without a scene, without a word. My quickness would have to be remarkable, however, and the question of a conveyance was the great one to settle. Tormented, in the hall, with difficulties and obstacles, I remember sinking down at the foot of the staircase—suddenly collapsing there on the lowest step and then, with a revulsion, recalling that it was exactly where more than a month before, in the darkness of night and just so bowed with evil things, I had seen the specter of the most horrible of women. At this I was able to straighten myself; I went the rest of the way up; I made, in my bewilderment, for the schoolroom, where there were objects belonging to me that I should have to take. But I opened the door to find again, in a flash, my eyes unsealed. In the presence of what I saw I reeled straight back upon my resistance.
Seated at my own table in clear noonday light I saw a person whom, without
my previous experience, I should have taken at the first blush for some
housemaid who might have stayed at home to look after the place and ho,
availing herself of rare relief from observation and of the 
schoolroom
table and my pens, ink, and paper, had applied herself to the considerable
effort of a letter to her sweetheart. There was an effort in the way that,
while her arms rested on the table, her hands with evident weariness supported
her head; but at the moment I took this in I had already become aware that,
in spite of my entrance, her attitude strangely persisted. Then it was—with
the very act of its announcing itself—that her identity fiared up in a
change of posture. She rose, not as if she had heard me, but with an indescribable
grand melancholy of indifference and detachment, and, within a dozen feet
of me, stood there as my vile predecessor. Dishonored and tragic, she was
all before me; but even as I fixed and, for memory, secured it, the awful
image passed away. Dark as midnight in her black dress, her haggard beauty
and her unutterable woe, she had looked at me long enough to appear to
say that her right to sit at my table was as good as mine to sit at hers.
While these instants lasted, indeed, I had the extraordinary chill of feeling
that it was I who was the intruder. It was as a wild protest against it
that, actually addressing her— "You terrible, miserable woman!"—I heard
myself break into a sound that, by the open door, rang through the long
passage and the empty house. She looked at me as if she heard me, but I
had recovered myself and cleared the air. There was nothing in the room
the next minute but the sunshine and a sense that I must stay.
* for additional texts and information, please go:
http://www.newpaltz.edu/~hathaway/
