A villager describes seeing a woman in a blue-gray cloak do something cruel to a ghost—a dead girl who appears at the back step begging for bread. The woman throws a stone at her. The speaker, who is “ironical and proud,” asks why anyone should get involved when someone harms a beggar in a shroud. The speaker watches the girl cringe and whine, then shrugs it off because she was no relative.
The mood is cold, eerie, and quietly damning. The real mystery isn’t just the ghost, but the speaker’s own chilling detachment. He sees suffering, feels a flicker of conscience, and suppresses it with a flimsy excuse. Wylie makes the reader feel the wrongness of that indifference—how a village can witness cruelty and do nothing.