A Ghost of the Sea by Francis Prevost

A Ghost of the Sea by Francis Prevost
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On the Cornish coast, a man is dying by the sea. He has chosen to be there, and he knows why, and he is willing — with one exception — to let the world draw its own conclusions. The exception is a story he has told no one: a woman he met in Cairo, a wrong he did her, and something that has followed him across the water ever since. Not threatening. Not reproachful. Simply there, at the edge of the known world, in a light that has no name in any spectrum the living can account for.

Prevost's 1893 story asks, without sentimentality and without resolution, what we leave behind us when we refuse an honest encounter — and whether what we leave behind stays left.

A Ghost of the Sea was first published in 1893 in Prevost's collection Rust of Gold, issued by Ward and Lock, London.

Francis Prevost was the pen name of Harry Francis Prevost Battersby (1862–1949), soldier, war correspondent, novelist, and lifelong investigator of psychical phenomena.