[See p. 176 
 
 MRS. ALDERLING CAME OUT WITH A BOOK IN HER 
 HAND" 
 
Copyright, 1903, by HARPER & BROTHBRS. 
 
 AU rights reserved. 
 Published May, 1903 
 
Questionable shares 
 
 W.E.Eowells. 
 
 New York and London 
 Harper & brothers 
 1903 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 lllf* APPARITION 
 
 TI1K AMiKI. OK TIIK 1.oUI 
 
 THUtOU U.NE IIU-E KHOM lilt DKA 
 
 Kitt 
 
HIS APPAKITION. 
 
HIS APPAEITION. 
 
 THE incident was of a dignity which the supernat 
 ural has by no means always had, and which has 
 been more than ever lacking in it since the manifesta 
 tions of professional spiritualism began to vulgarize 
 it. Hewson appreciated this as soon as he realized 
 that he had been confronted with an apparition. He 
 had been very little agitated at the moment, and it 
 was not till later, when the conflict between sense and 
 reason concerning the fact itself arose, that he was 
 aware of any perturbation. Even then, amidst the 
 tumult of his whirling emotions he had a sort of cen 
 tral calm, in which he noted the particulars of the 
 occurrence with distinctness and precision. He had 
 always supposed that if anything of the sort happened 
 to him he would be greatly frightened, but he had 
 not been at all frightened, so far as he could make 
 out. His hair had not risen, or his cheek felt a chill ; 
 his heart had not lost or gained a beat in its pulsation ; 
 
6 HIS AFPA1UTION. 
 
 and his prime conclusion was that if the Mysteries 
 had chosen him an agent in approaching the material 
 world they had not made a mistake. This becomes 
 grotesque in being put into words, but the words do 
 not misrepresent, except by their inevitable excess, 
 the mind in which Hewson rose, and flung open his 
 shutters to let in the dawn upon the scene of the ap 
 parition, which he now perceived must have been, as 
 it were, self-lighted. The robins were yelling from 
 the trees and the sparrows bickering under them; 
 catbirds were calling from the thickets of syringa, and 
 in the nearest woods a hermit-thrush was ringing its 
 crystal bells. The clear day was penetrating the east 
 with the subtle light which precedes the sun, and a 
 summer sweetness rose cool from the garden below, 
 gray with dew. 
 
 In the solitude of the hour there was an intimation 
 of privity to the event which had taken place, an 
 implication of the unity of the natural and the super 
 natural, strangely different from that robust gayety 
 of the plain day which later seemed to disown the 
 affair, and leave the burden of proof altogether to the 
 human witness. By this time Hewson had already 
 set about to putting it in such phrases as should carry 
 conviction to the hearer, and yet should convey to 
 
HIS APPARITION. 7 
 
 him no suspicion of the pride which Hewson felt in 
 the incident as a sort of tribute to himself. He dram 
 atized the scene at breakfast when he should describe 
 it in plain, matter-of-fact terms, and hold every one 
 spellbound, as he or she leaned forward over the table 
 to listen, while he related the fact with studied un 
 concern for his own part in it, but with a serious 
 regard for the integrity of the fact itself, which he 
 had no wish to exaggerate as to its immediate mean 
 ing or remoter implications. It did not yet occur to 
 him that it had none ; they were simply to be matters 
 of future observation in a second ordeal ; for the first 
 emotion which the incident imparted was the feeling 
 that it would happen again, and in this return would 
 interpret itself. Hewson was so strongly persuaded 
 of something of the kind, that after standing for an 
 indefinite period at the window in his pajamas, he got 
 hardily back into bed, and waited for the repetition. 
 He was agreeably aware of waiting without a tremor, 
 and rather eagerly than otherwise ; then he began to 
 feel drowsy, and this at first flattered him, as a proof 
 of his strange courage in circumstances which would 
 have rendered sleep impossible to most men ; but in 
 another moment he started from it. If he slept every 
 one would say he had dreamt the whole thing; and 
 
8 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 he could never himself be quite sure that he had 
 not. 
 
 He got up, and began to dress, thinking all the 
 time, in a dim way, how very long it would be till 
 breakfast, and wondering what he should do till then 
 with his appetite and his apparition. It was now 
 only a little after four o clock of the June morning, 
 and nobody would be down till after eight ; most 
 people at that very movable feast, which St. John 
 had in the English fashion, did not show themselves 
 before nine. It was impossible to get a book and 
 read for five hours ; he would be dropping with hun 
 ger if he walked so long. Yet he must not sleep ; 
 and he must do something to keep from sleeping. He 
 remembered a little interloping hotel, which had lately 
 forced its way into precincts sacred to cottage life, 
 and had impudently called itself the St. Johns wort 
 Inn, after St. John s place, by a name which he prided 
 himself on having poetically invented from his own 
 and that of a prevalent wild flower. Upon the chance 
 of getting an early cup of coffee at this hotel, Hewson 
 finished dressing, and crept down stairs to let himself 
 out of the house. 
 
 He not only found the door locked, as he had 
 expected, but the key taken out ; and after some mis- 
 
HIS APPARITION. 9 
 
 giving lie decided to lift one of the long library 
 windows, from which he could get into the garden, 
 closing the window after him, and so make his escape. 
 No one was stirring outside the house any more than 
 within ; he knocked down a trellis by which a clematis 
 was trying to climb over the window he emerged 
 from, and found his way out of the grounds without 
 alarming any one. He was not so successful at the 
 hotel, where a lank boy, sweeping the long piazzas, 
 recognized one of the St. Johnswort guests in the 
 figure approaching the steps, and apparently had his 
 worst fears roused for Hewson s sanity when Hewson 
 called to him and wondered if he could get a cup of 
 coffee at that hour ; he openly owned it was an un 
 natural hour, and he had a fine inward sense that it 
 was supernatural. The boy dropped his broom with 
 out a word, and vanished through the office door, 
 reappearing after a blank interval to pick up his 
 broom and say, " I guess so, " as he began sweeping 
 again. It was well, for one reason that he did not 
 state his belief too confidently, Hewson thought; but 
 after another interval of unknown length a rude, sad 
 girl came to tell him his coffee was waiting for him. 
 He followed her back into the still dishevelled dining- 
 room, and sat down at a long table to a cup of luke- 
 
10 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 warm drink that in color and quality recalled terrible 
 mornings of Atlantic travel when he haplessly rose 
 and descended to the dining-saloon of the steamer, 
 and had a marine version of British coffee brought 
 him by an alien table-steward. 
 
 He remembered the pock-marked nose of one alien 
 steward, and how he had questioned whether he 
 should give the fellow six-pence or a shilling, seeing 
 that apart from this tribute he should have to fee his 
 own steward for the voyage ; at the same time his 
 fancy played with the question whether that uncouth, 
 melancholy waitress had found a moment to wash her 
 face before hurrying to fetch his coffee. He amused 
 himself by contrasting her sloven dejection with the 
 brisk neatness of the service at St. Johnswort; but 
 through all he never lost the awe, the sense of re 
 sponsibility which he bore to the vision vouchsafed 
 him, doubtless for some reason and to some end that 
 it behooved him to divine. 
 
 He found a yesterday s paper in the office of the 
 hotel, and read it till he began to drowse over it, 
 when he pulled himself up with a sharp jerk. He 
 discovered that it was now six o clock, and he thought 
 if he could walk about for an hour he might return 
 to St. Johnswort, and worry through the remaining 
 
HIS APPARITION. 11 
 
 hour till breakfast somehow. He was still framing 
 in his thoughts some sort of statement concerning the 
 apparition which he should make when the largest 
 number of guests had got together at the table, with 
 a fine question whether he should take them between 
 the cantaloupe and the broiled chicken, or wait till 
 they had come to the corn griddle-cakes, which St. 
 John s cook served of a filigree perfection in homage 
 to the good old American breakfast ideal. There 
 would be more women, if he waited, and he should 
 need the sympathy and countenance of women ; his 
 story would be wanting in something of its supreme 
 effect without the electrical response of their keener 
 nerves. 
 
n. 
 
 WHEN Hewson came up to the cottage he was 
 sensible of a certain agitation in the air, which was 
 intensified to him by the sight of St. John, in his 
 bare, bald head and the neglige of a flannel house 
 coat, inspecting, with the gardener and one of the 
 grooms, the fallen trellis under the library window, 
 which from time to time they looked up at, as they 
 talked. Hewson made haste to join them, through 
 the garden gate, and to say shamefacedly enough, 
 " Oh, I m afraid I m responsible for that, " and he 
 told how he must have thrown down the trellis in 
 getting out of the window. 
 
 " Oh ! " said St. John, while the two men walked 
 away with dissatisfied grins at being foiled of their 
 sensation. " We thought it was burglars. I m so 
 glad it was only you. " But in spite of his profes 
 sion, St. John did not give Hewson any very lively 
 proof of his enjoyment. " Deuced uncomfortable to 
 
HIS APPARITION. 13 
 
 have had one s guests murdered in their beds. Don t 
 say anything about it, please, Hewson. The women 
 would all fly the premises, if there d been even a sus 
 picion of burglars. " 
 
 " Oh, no ; I won t, " Hewson willingly assented ; 
 but he perceived a disappointment in St. John s tone 
 and manner, and he suspected him, however unjustly, 
 of having meant to give himself importance with his 
 guests by the rumor of a burglary in the house. 
 
 He was a man quite capable of that, Hewson be 
 lieved, and failing it, capable of pretending that he 
 wanted the matter hushed up in the interest of 
 others. 
 
 In any case he saw that it was not to St. John pri 
 marily, or secondarily to St. John s guests, that he 
 could celebrate the fact of his apparition. In the 
 presence of St. John s potential vulgarity he keenly 
 felt his own, and he recoiled from what he had im 
 agined doing. He even realized that he would have 
 been working St. John an injury by betraying his 
 house to his guests as the scene of a supernatural 
 incident. 
 
 Nobody believes in ghosts, but there is not one in 
 a thousand of us who would not be uncomfortable in 
 a haunted house, or a house so reputed. If Hewson 
 
14: HIS APPARITION. 
 
 told what he had seen, he would not only scatter St. 
 John s house-party to the four winds, but he would 
 cast such a blight upon St. Johnswort that it would 
 never sell for a tenth of its cost. 
 
III. 
 
 FROM that instant Hewson renounced his purpose, 
 and he remained true to this renunciation in spite of 
 the behavior of St. John, which might well have 
 tempted him to a revenge in kind. No one seemed 
 to have slept late that morning ; several of the ladies 
 complained that they had riot slept a wink the whole 
 night, and two or three of the men owned to having 
 waked early and not been able to hit it off again in a 
 morning nap, though it appeared that they were 
 adepts in that sort of thing. The hour of their vigils 
 corresponded so nearly with that of Hewson s appari 
 tion that he wondered if a mystical influence from it 
 had not penetrated the whole house. The adventi 
 tious facts were of such a nature that he controlled 
 with the greater difficulty the wish to explode upon 
 an audience so aptly prepared for it the prodigious 
 incident which he was keeping in reserve ; but he did 
 not yield even when St. John carefully led up to the 
 
16 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 point through the sensation of his guests, by recount 
 ing the evidences of the supposed visit of a burglar, 
 and then made his effect by suddenly turning upon 
 Hewson, and saying with his broad guffaw : " And 
 here you have the burglar in person. He has owned 
 his crime to me, and I ve let him off the penalty on 
 condition that he tells you all about it. " The humor 
 was not too rank for the horsey people whom St. John 
 had mainly about him, but some of the women said, 
 " Poor Mr. Hewson ! " when the host, failing Hewson s 
 confession, went on to betray that he had risen at 
 that unearthly hour to go down to the St. Johnswort 
 Inn for a cup of its famous coffee. The coffee turned 
 out to be the greatest kind of joke ; one of the men 
 asked Hewson if he could say on his honor that it 
 was really any better than St. John s coffee there be 
 fore them, and another professed to be in a secret 
 more recondite than had yet been divined: it was 
 that long grim girl, who served it; she had lured 
 Hewson from his rest at five o clock in the morning ; 
 and this humorist proposed a Welsh rarebit some 
 night at the inn, where they could all see for them 
 selves why Hewson broke out of the house and 
 smashed a trellis before sunrise. 
 
 Hewson sat silent, not even attempting a defensive 
 
HIS APPARITION. 17 
 
 sally. In fact it was only his surface mind which 
 was employed with what was going on ; as before, his 
 deeper thought was again absorbed with his great 
 experience. He could not, if his conscience had 
 otherwise suffered him, have spoken of it in that com 
 pany, and the laughter died away from his .silence as 
 if it had been his offence. 
 
 He was not offended, but he was ashamed, and not 
 ashamed so much for St. John as for himself, that 
 he could have ever imagined acquiring merit in such 
 company by exploiting an experience which should 
 have been sacred to him. How could he have been 
 so shabby ? He was justly punished in the humilia 
 ting contrast between being the butt of these poor 
 wits, and the hero of an incident which, whatever its 
 real quality was, had an august character of mystery. 
 He had recognized this from the first instant ; he had 
 perceived that the occurrence was for him, and for 
 him alone, until he had reasoned some probable mean 
 ing into it or from it ; and yet he had been willing, 
 he saw it, he owned it ! to win the applause of that 
 crowd as a man who had just seen a ghost. 
 
 He thought of them as that crowd, but after all, 
 they were good-natured people, and when they fancied 
 that he was somehow vexed with the turn the talk 
 
18 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 had taken, they began to speak of other things; St. 
 John himself led the way, and when he got Hewsoii 
 alone after breakfast, he made him a sort of amend. 
 " I didn t mean to annoy you, old fellow, " he said, 
 " with my story about the burglary. " 
 
 " Oh, that s all right, " Hewson brisked up in re 
 sponse, as he took the cigar St. John offered him. 
 " I m afraid I must have seemed rather stupid. I had 
 got to thinking about something else, and I couldn t 
 pull myself away from it. I wasn t annoyed at all. " 
 
 Whether St. John thought this sufficient gratitude 
 for his reparation did not appear. As Hewson did 
 not offer to break the silence in which they went on 
 smoking, his host made a pretext, toward the end of 
 their cigars, after bearing the burden of the conversa 
 tion apparently as long as he could, of being reminded 
 of something by the group of women descending into 
 the garden from the terraced walk beyond it and then 
 slowly, with little pauses, trailing their summer dra 
 peries among the flower-beds and bushes toward the 
 house. 
 
 " Oh, by-the-way, " he said, " T should like to in 
 troduce you to Miss Hernshaw ; she came last night 
 with Mrs. Rock : that tall girl, there, lagging behind 
 a little. She s an original. " 
 
HIS APPARITION. 19 
 
 " I noticed her at breakfast, " Hewson answered, 
 now first aware of having been struck with the strange 
 beauty and strange behavior of the slim girl, who 
 drooped in her chair, with her little head fallen for 
 ward, and played with her bread, ignoring her food 
 otherwise, while she listened with a bored air to the 
 talk which made Hewson its prey. She had an effect 
 of being both shy and indifferent, in this retrospect ; 
 and when St. John put up the window, and led the 
 way out to the women in the garden, and presented 
 Hewson, she had still this effect. She did not smile 
 or speak in acknowledgement of Hewson s bow ; 
 she merely looked at him with a sort of swift inten 
 sity, and then, when one of the women said, " We 
 were coming to view the scene of your burglarious 
 exploit, Mr. Hewson. Was that the very window ? " 
 the girl looked impatiently away. 
 
 " The very window, " Hewson owned. " You 
 wouldn t know it. St. John has had the trellis put 
 up and the spot fresh turfed, " and he detached the 
 interlocutory widow in the direction of their bachelor 
 host, as she perhaps intended he should, and dropped 
 back to the side of Miss Hernshaw. 
 
 She was almost spiritually slender. In common 
 
 with all of us, he had heard that shape of girl called 
 2 
 
20 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 willowy, but he made up his mind that sweetbriery 
 would be the word for Miss Hernshaw, in whose face 
 a virginal youth suggested the tender innocence and 
 surprise of the flower, while the droop of her figure, 
 at once delicate and self-reliant, arrested the fancy 
 with a sense of the pendulous thorny spray. She 
 looked not above sixteen in age, but as she was obvi 
 ously out, in the society sense of the word, this must 
 have been a moral effect ; and Hewson was casting 
 about in his mind for some appropriate form of 
 thought and language to make talk in when she ab 
 ruptly addressed him. 
 
 " I don t see, " she said, with her face still away, 
 "why people make fun of those poor girls who 
 have to work in that sort of public way. " 
 
 Hewson silently picked his steps back through the 
 intervening events to the drolling at breakfast, and 
 with some misgiving took his stand in the declara 
 tion, " You mean the waitress at the inn ? " 
 
 "Yes!" cried the girl, with a gentle indignation, 
 which was so dear to the young man that he would 
 have given anything to believe that it veiled a measure 
 of sympathy for himself as well as for the waitress. 
 " We went in there last night when we arrived, for 
 some pins Mrs. Rock had had her dress stepped on, 
 
HIS APPARITION. 21 
 
 getting out of the car and that girl brought them. 
 I never saw such a sad face. And she was very nice ; 
 she had no more manners than a cow. " 
 
 Miss Hernshaw added the last sentence as if it fol 
 lowed, and in his poor masculine pride of sequence 
 Hewson wanted to ask if that were why she was so 
 nice ; but he obeyed a better instinct in saying, " Yes, 
 there s a whole tragedy in it. I wonder if it s poten 
 tial or actual. " He somehow felt safe in being so 
 metaphysical. 
 
 " Does it make any difference ? " Miss Hernshaw 
 demanded, whirling her face round, and fixing him 
 with eyes of beautiful fierceness. " Tragedy is trage 
 dy, whether you have lived it or not, isn t it ? And 
 sometimes it s all the more tragical if you have it still 
 to live : you ve got it before you ! I don t see how 
 any one can look at that girl s face and laugh at her. 
 I should never forgive any one who did. " 
 
 " Then I m glad I didn t do any of the laughing, " 
 said Hewson, willing to relieve himself from the strain 
 of this high mood, and yet anxious not to fall too far 
 below it. " Perhaps I should, though, if I hadn t 
 been the victim of it in some degree. " 
 
 " It was the vulgarest thing I ever heard ! " said the 
 girl. 
 
22 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 Hewson looked at her, but she had averted her face 
 again. He had a longing to tell her of his apparition 
 which quelled every other interest in him, and, as it 
 were, blurred his whole consciousness. She would 
 understand, with her childlike truth, and with her un- 
 conventionality she would not find it strange that he 
 should speak to her of such a thing for no apparent 
 reason or no immediate cause. 
 
 He walked silent at her side, revolving his longing 
 in his thought, and hating the circumstance which 
 forbade him to speak at once. He did not know how 
 long he was lost in this, when he was suddenly re 
 called to fearful question of the fact by her saying, 
 with another flash of her face toward him, " You have 
 lost sleep Mr. Hewson ! " and she whipped forward, 
 and joined the other women, who were following the 
 lead of St. John and the widow. 
 
 Mrs. Rock, to whom Hewson had been presented 
 at the same time as to Miss Hernshaw, looked vague 
 ly back at him over her shoulder, but made no attempt 
 to include him in her group, and he thought, for no 
 reason, that she was kept from doing so on account 
 of Miss Hernshaw. He thought he could be no more 
 mistaken in this than in the resentment of Miss Hern 
 shaw, which he was aware of meriting, however 
 
HIS APPARITION. 23 
 
 unintentionally. Later, after lunch, lie made sure of 
 this fact when Mrs. Rock got him into a corner, and 
 cozily began, " I always feel like explaining Rosalie 
 a little, " and then her vague, friendly eye wandered 
 toward Miss Hernshaw across the room, and stopped, 
 as if waiting for the girl to look away. But Miss 
 Hernshaw did not look away, and that afternoon, 
 Hewson s week being up, he left St. Johnswort before 
 dinner. 
 
IV. 
 
 THE time came, before the following winter, when 
 Hewson was tempted beyond his strength, and told 
 the story of his apparition. He told it more than 
 once, and kept himself with increasing difficulty from 
 lying about it. He always wished to add something, 
 to amplify the fact, to heighten the mystery of the 
 circumstances, to divine the occult significance of the 
 incident. In itself the incident, when stated, was 
 rather bare and insufficient; but he held himself 
 rigidly to the actual details, and he felt that in this 
 at least he was offering the powers which had vouch 
 safed him the experience a species of atonement for 
 breaking faith with them. It seemed like breaking 
 faith with Miss Hernshaw, too, though this impres 
 sion would have been harder to reason than the other. 
 Both impressions began to wear off after the first 
 tellings of the story; the wound that Hewson gave 
 his sensibility in the very first cicatrized before the 
 
HIS APPARITION. 25 
 
 second, and at the fourth or fifth it had quite cal 
 loused over; so that he did not mind anything so 
 much as what always seemed to him the inadequate 
 effect of his experience with his hearers. Some lis 
 tened carelessly ; some nervously ; some incredulously, 
 as if he were trying to put up a job on them ; some 
 compassionately, as if he were not quite right, and 
 ought to be looked after. There was a consensus of 
 opinion, among those who offered any sort of com 
 ment, that he ought to give it to the Psychical 
 Research, and at the bottom of Hewson s heart, there 
 was a dread that the spiritualists would somehow get 
 hold of him. This remained to stay him, when the 
 shame of breaking faith with Miss Hernshaw and 
 with Mystery no longer restrained him from exploit 
 ing the fact. He was aware of lying in wait for 
 opportunities of telling it, and he swore himself to 
 tell it only upon direct provocation, or when the oc 
 casion seemed imperatively to demand it. He 
 commonly brought it out to match some experience 
 of another ; but he could never deny a friendly appeal 
 when he sat with some good fellows over their five- 
 o clock cocktails at the club, and one of them would 
 say in behalf of a new-comer, " Hewson, tell Wilkins 
 that odd thing that happened to you up country in 
 
26 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 the summer. " In complying he tried to save his 
 self-respect by affecting a contemptuous indifference 
 in the matter, and beginning reluctantly and pooh- 
 poohingly. He had pangs afterwards as he walked 
 home to dress for dinner, but his self-reproach was 
 less afflicting as time passed. His suffering from it 
 was never so great as from the slight passed upon his 
 apparition, when Wilkins or what other it might be, 
 would meet the suggestion that he should tell him 
 about it, with the hurried interposition, " Yes, I have 
 heard that ; good story. " This would make Hewson 
 think that he was beginning to tell his story too of 
 ten, and that perhaps the friend who suggested his 
 doing so, was playing upon his forgetfulness. He 
 wondered if he were really something of a bore with 
 it, and whether men were shying off from him at the 
 club on account of it. He fancied that might be the 
 reason why the circle at the five-o clock cocktails 
 gradually diminished as the winter passed. He 
 continued to join it till the chance offered of squarely 
 refusing to tell Wilkins, or whoever, about the odd 
 thing that had happened to him up country in the 
 summer. Then he felt that he had in a manner re 
 trieved himself, and could retire from the five-o clock 
 cocktails with honor. 
 
HIS APPARITION. 27 
 
 That it was a veridical phantom which had 
 appeared to him he did not in his inmost at all doubt, 
 though in his superficial consciousness he questioned 
 it, not indeed so disrespectfully as he pooh-poohed it 
 to others, but still questioned it. This he thought 
 somehow his due as a man of intelligence who ought 
 not to suffer himself to fall into superstition even 
 upon evidence granted to few. Superficially, how 
 ever, as well as interiorly, he was aware of always 
 expecting its repetition ; and now, six months after 
 the occurrence this expectation was as vivid with him 
 as it was the first moment after the vision had van 
 ished, while his tongue was yet in act to stay it with 
 speech. He would not have been surprised at any 
 time in walking into his room to find Tt there; or 
 waking at night to confront It in the electric flash 
 which he kindled by a touch of the button at his 
 bedside. Rather, he was surprised that nothing of 
 the sort happened, to confirm him in his belief that 
 he had been all but in touch with the other life, or to 
 give him some hint, the slightest, the dimmest, why 
 this vision had been shown him, and then instantly 
 broken and withdrawn. In that inmost of his where 
 he recognized its validity, he could not deny that it 
 had a meaning, and that it had been sent him for 
 
28 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 some good reason special to himself ; though at the 
 times when he had prefaced his story of it with terms 
 of slighting scepticism, he had professed neither to 
 know nor to care why the thing had happened. He 
 always said that he had never been particularly inter 
 ested in the supernatural, and then was ashamed of a 
 lie that was false to universal human experience ; but 
 he could truthfully add that he had never in his life 
 felt less like seeing a ghost than that morning. It 
 was not full day, but it was perfectly light, and there 
 the thing was, as palpable to vision as any of the 
 men that moment confronting him with cocktails in 
 their hands. Asked if he did not think he had 
 dreamed it, he answered scornfully that he did not 
 think, he knew, he had not dreamed it; he did not 
 value the experience, it was and had always been per 
 fectly meaningless, but he would stake his life upon 
 its reality. Asked if it had not perhaps been the 
 final office of a nightcap, he disdained to answer at 
 all, though he did not openly object to the laugh 
 which the suggestion raised. 
 
 Secretly, within his inmost, Hewson felt justly 
 punished by the laughter. He had been unworthy of 
 his apparition in lightly exposing it to such a chance ; 
 he had fallen below the dignity of his experience. 
 
HIS APPARITION. 29 
 
 He might never hope to fathom its meaning while he 
 lived ; but he grieved for the wrong he had done it, 
 as if at the instant of the apparition he had offered 
 that majestic, silent figure some grotesque indignity : 
 thrown a pillow at it, or hailed it in tones of mocking 
 offence. He was profoundly and exquisitely ashamed 
 even before he ceased to tell the story for his lis 
 teners idle amusement. When he stopped doing so, 
 and snubbed solicitation with the curt answer that 
 everybody had heard that story, he was retrospec 
 tively ashamed ; and mixed with the expectation of 
 seeing the vision again was the formless wish to offer 
 it some sort of reparation, of apology. 
 
 He longed to prove himself not wholly unworthy 
 of the advance that had been made him from the 
 other world upon grounds which he had done his 
 worst to prove untenable. He could not imagine 
 what the grounds were, though he had to admit their 
 probable existence : such an event might have no ob 
 vious or present significance, but it had not happened 
 for nothing ; it could not have happened for no 
 thing. Hewson might not have been in what he 
 thoaght any stressful need of ghostly comfort or 
 reassurance in matters of faith. He was not inordi 
 nately agnostic, or in the way of becoming so. He 
 
30 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 was simply an average skeptical American, who de 
 nied no more than he affirmed, and who really 
 concerned himself so little about his soul, though he 
 tried to keep his conscience decently clean, that he 
 had not lately asked whether other people had such a 
 thing or not. He had not lost friends, and he was so 
 much alone in this world that it seemed improbable 
 the fate of any uncle or cousin, in the absence of 
 more immediate kindred, should be mystically fore 
 cast to him. He was perfectly well at the time of 
 the apparition, and it could not have been the figment 
 of a disordered digestion, as the lusty hunger which 
 willingly appeased itself with the coffee of the St. 
 Johnswort Inn sufficiently testified. Yet, in spite of 
 all this, an occurrence so out of the course of events 
 must have had some message for him, and it must 
 have been his fault that he could not divine it. A 
 sense of culpability grew upon him with the sense of 
 his ignominy in cheapening it by making it subser 
 vient to what he knew was, in the last analysis, a 
 wretched vanity. At least he could refuse himself 
 that miserable gratification hereafter, and he got back 
 some measure of self-respect in forbidding himself 
 the pleasure he might have taken in being noted for a 
 strange experience he could never be got to speak of. 
 
V. 
 
 THE implication of any such study as this is that 
 the subject of it is continuously if not exclusively oc 
 cupied with the matter which is supposed to make 
 him interesting. But of course it was not so with 
 Hewson, who perhaps did not think of his apparition 
 once in a fortnight, or oftener, say, than he thought 
 of the odd girl with whom for no reason, except con 
 temporaneity in his acquaintance, he associated with 
 it. If he never thought of the apparition without 
 subconsciously expecting its return, he equally ex 
 pected when he thought of Miss Hernshaw that the 
 chances of society would bring them together again, 
 and it was with no more surprise than if the vision 
 had intimated its second approach that he one night 
 found her name in the minute envelope which the 
 footman presented him at a house where he was going 
 to dine, and realized that he was appointed to take 
 her out. It was a house where he rather liked to go, 
 
32 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 for in that New York of his where so few houses had 
 any distinctive character, this one had a temperament 
 of its own in so far that you might expect to meet 
 people of temperament there, if anywhere. They 
 were indeed held in a social solution where many 
 other people of no temperament at all floated largely 
 and loosely about, but they were there, all the same, 
 and it was worth coming on the chance of meeting 
 them, though the indiscriminate hospitality of the 
 hostess might let the evening pass without promoting 
 the chance. Now, however, she had unwittingly put 
 into Hewson s keeping, for two hours at least, the 
 very temperament that had kept his fancy for the last 
 half-year and more. He fairly laughed at sight of 
 the name on the little card, and hurried into the draw 
 ing-room, where the first thing after greeting his 
 hostess, he caught the wandering look and vague smile 
 of Mrs. Rock. The look and the smile became per 
 sonal to him, and she welcomed him with a curious 
 resumption of the confidential terms in which they 
 had seemed to part that afternoon at St. Johnswort. 
 He thought that she was going to begin talking to 
 him where she had left off, about Rosalie, as she had 
 called her, and he was disappointed in the common 
 places that actually ensued. At the end of these, 
 
HIS APPAKITION. 33 
 
 however, she did say : " Miss Hernshc.w is here with 
 me. Have you seen her ? " 
 
 " Oh, yes, " Hewson returned, for he had caught 
 sight of the girl in a distant group, on his way up to 
 Mrs. Rock, but in view of the affluent opportunity 
 before him had richly forborne trying even to make 
 her bow to him, though he believed she had seen him. 
 " I am to have the happiness of going out with her. " 
 " Oh, indeed, " said Mrs. Rock, " that is nice, " and 
 then the people began assorting themselves, and the 
 man who was appointed to take Mrs. Rock out, came 
 and bowed Hewson away. 
 
 He hastened to that corner of the room where Miss 
 Hernshaw was waiting, and if he had been suddenly 
 confronted with his apparition he could not have ex 
 perienced a deeper and stranger satisfaction than lie 
 felt as the girl lifted up her innocent fierce face upon 
 him. 
 
 It brought back that whole day at St. Johnswort, 
 of which she, with his vision, formed the supreme 
 interest and equally the mystery ; and it went warmly 
 to his heart to have her peremptorily abolish all 
 banalities by saying, " I was wondering if they were 
 going to give me you, as soon as you came in. " 
 She put her slim hand on his arm as she spoke, and 
 
34 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 he thought she must have felt him quiver at her 
 touch. " Then you were not afraid thev were going 
 to give you me ? " he bantered. 
 
 " No, " she said, " I wanted to talk with you. I 
 wanted you to tell me what Mrs. Rock said about me ? " 
 
 " Just now ? She said you were here. " 
 
 " No, I mean that day at St. Johnswort. " 
 
 Hewson laughed out for pleasure in her frankness, 
 and then he felt a gathering up of his coat-sleeve 
 under her nervous fingers, as if (such a thing being 
 imaginable) she were going unwittingly to pinch him 
 for his teasing. " She said she wanted to explain you 
 a little. " 
 
 "And then what?" 
 
 " And then nothing. She seemed to catch your 
 eye, and she stopped. " 
 
 The fingers relaxed their hold upon that gathering 
 up of his coat- sleeve. " I won t be explained, and I 
 have told her so. If I choose to act myself, and show 
 out my real thoughts and feelings, how is it any worse 
 than if I acted somebody else ? " 
 
 " I should think it was very much better, " said 
 Hewson, inwardly warned to keep his face straight. 
 
VI. 
 
 THEY had time for no more talk between the draw 
 ing-room and the dinner table, and when Miss Hern- 
 shaw s chair had been pushed in behind her, and she 
 sat down, she turned instantly to the man on her right 
 and began speaking to him, and left Hewson to make 
 conversation with any one he liked or could. 
 
 He did not get on very well, not because there were 
 not enough amusing people beside him and over 
 against him, but because he was all the time trying to 
 eavesdrop what was saying between Miss Hernshaw 
 and the man on her right. It seemed to be absolute 
 trivialities they were talking; so far as Hewson made 
 out they got no deeper than the new play which was 
 then commanding the public favor apparently for the 
 reason that it was altogether surface, with no measure 
 upwards or downwards. Upon this surface the com 
 ment of the man on Miss Ilernshaw s right wandered 
 iudefatigably. 
 
30 HIS APPAKITION. 
 
 Hewson could not imagine of her sincerity a delib 
 erate purpose of letting the poor fellow show all the 
 shallowness that was in him, and of amusing itself 
 with his satisfaction in turning his empty mind inside 
 out for her inspection. She seemed, if not genuinely 
 interested, to be paying him an unaffected attention ; 
 but when the lady across the table addressed a word 
 to him, Miss Ilernshaw, as if she had been watching 
 for some such chance, instantly turned to Hewson. 
 
 " What do you think of Ghosts ? " she asked, 
 with imperative suddenness. 
 
 " Ghosts ? " he echoed. 
 
 Or perhaps you didn t go ? " she suggested, and 
 he perceived that she meant Ibsen s tragedy. But 
 he did not answer at once. He had had a shock, and 
 for a timeless space he had been back in his room at 
 St. Johnswort, with that weird figure seated at his 
 table. It seemed to vanish again when he gave a 
 second glance, as it had vanished before, and he drew 
 a long sigh, and looked a little haggardly at Miss 
 Ilernshaw. " Ah, I see you did ! Wasn t it tre 
 mendous ? I think the girl who did Regina was 
 simply awful, don t you ? " 
 
 " I don t know, " said Hewson, still so trammeled 
 in his own involuntary associations with the word as 
 
HIS APPARITION. 37 
 
 not fully to realize the strangeness of discussing 
 " Ghosts " with a young lady. But he pulled himself 
 together, and nimbly making his reflection that the 
 latitude of the stage gave room for the meeting of 
 cultivated intelligences in regions otherwise tabooed, 
 if they were of opposite sexes, he responded in kind. 
 " I think that the greatest miracle of the play and 
 to me it was altogether miraculous " 
 
 " Oh, I m glad to hear you say that ! " cried the 
 girl. "It was the greatest experience of my life. I 
 can t bear to have people undervalue it. I want to 
 hit them. But go on ! " 
 
 Hewson went on as gravely as he could in view of 
 her potential violence: he pictured Miss Hernshaw 
 beating down the inadequate witnesses of " Ghosts " 
 with her fan, which lay in her lap, with her cobwebby 
 handkerchief, drawn through its ring, and her long 
 limp gloves looking curiously like her pretty young 
 arms in their slenderness. " I was merely going to say 
 that the most prodigious effect of the play was among 
 the actors I won t venture on the spectators " 
 
 " No, don t ! It isn t speakable. " 
 
 " It s astonishing the effect a play of Ibsen s has 
 with the actors. They can t play false. It turns the 
 merest theatrical sticks into men and women, and it 
 
38 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 does it through the perfect honesty of the dramatist. 
 He deals so squarely with himself that they have to 
 deal squarely with themselves. They have to be, and 
 not just seem. " 
 
 Miss Hernshaw sighed deeply. " I m glad you 
 think that, " she said, and Hewson felt very glad too 
 that he thought that. 
 
 " Why? " he asked. 
 
 " Why ? Because that is what I always want to 
 do ; and it s what I always shall do, I don t care what 
 they say. " 
 
 " But I don t know whether I understand exactly. " 
 
 " Deal squarely with everybody. Say what I really 
 feel. Then they say what they really feel. " 
 
 There was an obscure resentment unworthily strug 
 gling at the bottom of Hewson s heart for her long 
 neglect of him in behalf of the man on her left. 
 " Yes, " he said, " if they are capable of really feeling 
 anything. " 
 
 " What do you mean ? Everybody really feels. " 
 
 " Well, then, thinking anything. " 
 
 She drew herself up a little with an air of question. 
 " I believe everybody really thinks, too, and it s your 
 duty to let them find out what they re thinking, by 
 truly saying what you think. " 
 
HIS APPARITION. 39 
 
 " Then she isn t dealing quite honestly with him, " 
 said Hewson, with a malicious smile. 
 
 The man at Miss Hernshaw s left was still talking 
 about the play, and he was at that moment getting 
 off a piece of pure parrotry about it to the lady across 
 the table : just what everybody had been saying about 
 it from the first. 
 
 " No, I should think she was not," said the girl, 
 gravely. She looked hurt, as if she had been unfairly 
 forced to the logic of her postulate, and Hewson was 
 not altogether pleased with himself ; but at least he 
 had had his revenge in making her realize the man s 
 vacuity. 
 
 He tried to get her back to talk about " Ghosts, " 
 again, but she answered with indifference, and just 
 then he was arrested by something a man was saying 
 near the head of the table. 
 
VII. 
 
 IT was rather a large dinner, but not so large that a 
 striking phrase, launched in a momentary lull, could 
 not fuse all the wandering attentions in a sole regard. 
 The man who spoke was the psychologist Wanhope, 
 and he was saying with a melancholy that mocked 
 itself a little in his smile: "I shouldn t be particular 
 about seeing a ghost myself. I have seen plenty of 
 men who had seen men who had seen ghosts ; but I 
 never yet saw a man who had seen a ghost. If I had 
 it would go a long way to persuade me of ghosts. " 
 
 Hewson felt his heart thump in his throat. There 
 was a pause, and it was as if all eyes but the eyes of 
 the psychologist turned upon him ; these rested upon 
 the ice which the servant had just then silently slip 
 ped under them. Hewson had no reason to think 
 that any of the people present were acquainted with 
 his experience, but he thought it safest to take them 
 upon the supposition that they had, and after he had 
 
HIS APPARITION 41 
 
 said to the psychologist, "Will you allow me to 
 present him to you ? " he added, " I m afraid every 
 one else knows him too well already. " 
 
 "You!" said his vis-a-vis, arching her eyebrows; 
 and others up and down the table, looked rounder 
 over at Hewson where he sat midway of it with Miss 
 Hernshaw drooping beside him. She alone seemed 
 indifferent to his pretension ; she seemed even insensi 
 ble of it, as she broke off little corners of her ice with 
 her fork. 
 
 The psychologist fixed his eyes on him with 
 scientific challenge as well as scientific interest. "Do 
 you mean that you have seen a ghost ? " 
 
 " Yes ghost. Generically provisionally. We al 
 ways consider them ghosts, don t we, till they 
 prove themselves something else ? I once saw an 
 apparition. " 
 
 Several people who were near-sighted or far-placed 
 put on their eye-glasses, to make out whether 
 Hewson were serious ; a lady who had a handsome 
 forearm put up a lorgnette and inspected him through 
 it ; she had the air of questioning his taste, and the 
 subtle aura of her censure penetrated to him, though 
 she preserved a face of rigid impassivity. He re 
 turned her stare defiantly, though he was aware of 
 
42 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 not reaching her through the lenses as effectively as 
 she reached him. Most of those who prepared them 
 selves to listen seemed to be putting him on trial, and 
 they apparently justified themselves in this from the 
 cross-questioning method the psychologist necessarily 
 took in his wish to clarify the situation. 
 
 " How long ago was it ? " he asked, coldly. 
 
 " Last summer. " 
 
 " Was it after dark ? " 
 
 " Very much after. It was at day -break. " 
 
 " Oh ! You were alone ? " 
 
 " Quite. " 
 
 "You made sure you were not dreaming ? " 
 
 " I made sure of that, instantly. I was not awaken 
 ed by the apparition. I was already fully awake. " 
 
 " Had your mind been running on anything of the 
 kind ? " 
 
 " Nothing could have been farther from it. I was 
 thinking what a very long while it would be till 
 breakfast. " This was not true as to the order of the 
 fact ; but Hewson could not keep himself from saying 
 it, and it made a laugh and created a diversion in his 
 favor. 
 
 " How long did it seem to last ! " 
 
 " The vision ? That was very curious. The whole 
 
HIS APPARITION. 43 
 
 affair was quite achronic, as I may say. The figure 
 was there and it was not there. " 
 
 " It vanished suddenly ? " 
 
 " I can t say it vanished at all. It ought still to be 
 there. Have you ever returned to a place where you 
 had always been wrong as to the points of the com 
 pass, and found yourself right up to a certain 
 moment as you approached, and then without any 
 apparent change, found yourself perfectly wrong 
 again ? The figure was not there, and it was there, 
 and then it was not there. " 
 
 " I think I see what you mean, " said the psy 
 chologist, warily. " The evanescence was subjective. " 
 
 " Altogether. But so was the apparescence. " 
 
 " Ah ! " said Wanhope. " You hadn t any head 
 ache ? " 
 
 " Not the least. " 
 
 " Ah ! " The psychologist desisted with the effect 
 of letting the defence take the witness. 
 
 A general dissatisfaction diffused itself, and 
 Hewson felt it; but he disdained to do anything to 
 appease it. He remained silent for that appreciable 
 time which elapsed before his host said, almost com 
 passionately, "Won t you tell us all about it, Mr. 
 Hewson. " 
 
44 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 The guests, all but Miss Hernshaw, seemed to 
 return to their impartial frame, with a leaning in 
 Hewson s favor, such as the court-room feels when 
 the accused is about to testify in his own behalf ; the 
 listeners cannot help wishing him well, though they 
 may have their own opinions of his guilt. 
 
 "Why, there isn t any < all-about-it, " said 
 Hewson. " The whole thing has been stated as to 
 the circumstances and conditions. " He could see 
 the baffled greed in the eyes of those who were hun 
 gering for a morsel of the marvellous, and he made 
 it as meagre as he could. He had now no temptation 
 to exaggerate the simple fact, and he hurried it out 
 in the fewest possible words. 
 
VIII. 
 
 THE general disappointment was evident in the 
 moment of waiting which followed upon his almost 
 contemptuous ending. His audience some of them 
 took their cue from his own ironical manner, and 
 joked ; others looked as if they had been trifled with. 
 The psychologist said, " Curious. " He did not go 
 back to his position that belief in ghosts should 
 follow from seeing a man who had seen one; he 
 seemed rather annoyed by the encounter. The talk 
 took another turn and distributed itself again 
 between contiguous persons for the brief time that 
 elapsed before the women were to leave the men to 
 their coffee and cigars. 
 
 When their hostess rose Hewson offered his arm 
 to Miss Hernshaw. She had not spoken to him since 
 he had told the story of his apparition. Now she 
 said in an undertone so impassioned that every 
 vibration from her voice shook his heart, " If I were 
 you, I would never tell that story again ! " and she 
 
4:6 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 pressed his arm with unconscious intensity, while she 
 looked away from him. 
 
 " You don t believe it happened ? " he returned. 
 -."It did." 
 
 " Of course it happened ! Why shouldn t I believe 
 that ? But that s the very reason why I wouldn t have 
 told it. If it happened, it was something sacred 
 awful ! Oh, I don t see how you could bear to speak 
 of it at a dinner, when people were all torpid with 
 
 She stopped breathlessly, with a break in her voice 
 that sounded just short of a sob. 
 
 " Well, I m sufficiently ashamed of doing it, and 
 not for the first time, he said, in sullen discontent 
 with himself. " And I ve been properly punished. 
 You can t think how sick it makes me to realize what 
 a detestable sensation I was seeking. " 
 
 She did not heed what he was saying. " Was it 
 that morning at St. Johnswort when you got up so 
 early, and went for a cup of coffee at the inn ? " 
 
 " Yes. " 
 
 " I thought so ! I could follow every instant of it ; 
 I could see just how it was. If such a thing had 
 happened to me, I would have died before I spoke of 
 it at such a time as this. Oh, why do you suppose 
 it happened to you ? " the girl grieved. 
 
HIS APPARITIOK. 47 
 
 " Me, of all men ? " said Ilewson, with a self- 
 contemptuous smile. 
 
 " I thought you were different, " she said absently ; 
 then abruptly : " What are you standing here talking 
 to me so long for? You must go back! All the men 
 have gone back, " and Ilewson perceived that they 
 had arrived in the drawing-room, and were conspicu 
 ously parleying in the face of a dozen interested 
 women witnesses. 
 
 In the dining-room he took his way toward a 
 vacant place at the table near his host, who was say 
 ing behind his cigar to another old fellow : " I used 
 to know her mother ; she was rather original too ; but 
 nothing to this girl. I don t envy Mrs. Rock her job. " 
 
 " I don t know what the pay of a chaperon is, but 
 I suppose Hernshaw can make it worth her while, if 
 he s like the rest out there, " said the other old 
 fellow. " I imagine he s somewhere in his millions. " 
 
 The host held up one of his fingers. " Is that all ? 
 I thought more. Mines ? " 
 
 " Cattle. Ah, Mr. Ilewson, " said the host, turning 
 to welcome him to the chair on his other side. 
 " Have a cigar. That was a strong story you gave 
 us. It had a good fault, though. It was too short. " 
 
IX. 
 
 HEWSON had begun now to feel a keen, persistent, 
 painful sympathy for the apparition itself as for 
 some one whose confidence had been abused; and 
 this feeling was none the less, but all the more, poig 
 nant because it was he himself who was guilty 
 towards it. He pitied it in a sort as if it had been 
 the victim of a wrong more shocking perhaps for the 
 want of taste in it than for any real turpitude. This 
 was a quality of the event not without a strange con 
 solation. In arraying him on the side of the 
 apparition, it antagonized him with what he had 
 done, and enabled him to renounce and disown it. 
 
 From the night of that dinner, Hewson did not 
 again tell the story of his apparition, though the 
 opportunities to do so now sought him as constantly 
 as he had formerly sought them. They offered him 
 a fresh temptation through the different perversions 
 of the fact that had got commonly abroad, but he 
 
HIS APPARITION. 49 
 
 resisted this temptation, and let the perversions, 
 sometimes annoyingly, sometimes amusingly, but 
 always more and more wildly, wide of the reality, 
 take their course. In his reticence he had the sense 
 of atoning not only to the apparition but to Miss 
 Hernshaw too. 
 
 Before he met her again, Miss Hernshaw had been 
 carried off to Europe by Mrs. Rock, perhaps with the 
 purpose of trying the veteran duplicities of that 
 continent in breaking down the insurgent sincerity of 
 her ward. Hewson heard that she was not to be 
 gone a great while ; it was well into the winter when 
 they started, and he understood that they were 
 merely going to Rome for the end of the season, and 
 were then going to work northward, and after June 
 in London were coming home. He did not fail to 
 see her again before she left for any want of 
 wishing, but he did not happen to meet her at other 
 houses, and at the house of Mrs. Rock, if she had 
 one, he had not been asked to call, or invited to any 
 function. In thinking the point over it occurred to 
 Hewson that this was so because he was not wanted 
 there, and not wanted by Miss Hernshaw herself ; for 
 it had been in his brief experience of her that she let 
 people know what she wanted, and that with Mrs. 
 
50 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 Rock, whose character seemed to answer to her name 
 but poorly, she had ways of getting what she wanted. 
 If Miss Hernshaw had wished to meet him again, he 
 could not doubt that she would have asked him, or 
 at the least had him asked to come and see her, and 
 not have left it to the social fortutities to bring them 
 together. 
 
 Towards the end of the term which rumor had 
 fixed to her stay abroad Hewson s folly was embit 
 tered to him in a way that he had never expected in 
 his deepest shame and darkest forboding. But evil, 
 like good, does not cease till it has fulfilled itself in 
 every possible consequence. It seems even more 
 active and persistent. Good seems to satisfy itself 
 sometimes in the direct effect, but evil winds 
 sinuously in and out, and reaches round and over and 
 under its wretched author, and strikes him in every 
 tender and fatal place, with an ingenuity in finding 
 the places out that seems truly of hell. Hewson 
 thought he had paid the principal of his debt in full 
 through the hurt to his vanity in failing to gain any 
 sort of consequence from his apparition, but the in 
 terest of his debt had accumulated, and the sorest 
 pinch was in paying the interest. His penalty took 
 the form that was most of all distasteful to him : the 
 
HIS APPARITION. 51 
 
 form of publicity in the Sunday edition of a news 
 paper. A young lady attached to the staff of this 
 journal had got hold of his story, and had made her 
 reporter s Story of it, which she imaginatively cast in 
 the shape of an interview with Hewson. But worse 
 than this, and really beyond the vagary of the wildest 
 nightmare, she gave St. Johnswort as the scene of the 
 apparition, with all the circumstances of the supposed 
 burglary, while tastefully disguising Hewson s iden- 
 ity in the figure of A Well-Kuown Society-man. 
 
 When Hewson read this Story (and it seemed to 
 him that no means of bringing it to his notice at the 
 club, and on the street, and by mail was left 
 unemployed), he had two thoughts: one was of St. 
 John, and one was of Miss Hernshaw. In all his 
 exploitations of his experience he had carefully, he 
 thought religiously, concealed the scene, except that 
 one only time when Miss Hernshaw suddenly got it 
 out of him by that demand of hers, " Was it that 
 morning at St. Johnswort when you got up so early 
 and went for a cup of coffee at the inn ? " He had 
 confided so absolutely in her that his admission had 
 not troubled him at the time, and it had not troubled 
 him since, till now when he found the fact given this 
 hideous publicity, and knew that it could have be- 
 
52 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 come known only through, her: through her who had 
 seemed to make herself the protectress of his appari 
 tion and to guard it with indignation even against 
 his own slight ! 
 
 He could not tell himself what to think of her, and 
 in this disability he had at least the sad comfort of 
 literally thinking nothing of her; but he could not 
 keep his thoughts away from St. John. It appeared 
 to him that he thought and lived nothing else till his 
 dread concreted itself in the letter which came from 
 St. John as soon as that fatal newspaper could reach 
 him, and his demand for an explanation could come 
 back to Hewson. He wrote from St. Johnswort, 
 where he had already gone for the season, and he 
 assumed, as no doubt he had a right to do, that the 
 whole thing was a fake, and that if Hewson was 
 hesitating about denying it for fear of giving it fur 
 ther prominence, or out of contempt for it, he wished 
 that he would not hesitate. There were reasons, 
 which would suggest themselves to Hewson, why the 
 thing, if merely and entirely a fake, should be very 
 annoying, and he thought that it would be best to 
 make the denial immediate and imperative. To this 
 end he advised Ilewson s sending the newspaper 
 people a lawyer s letter; with the ulterior trouble 
 
HIS APPARITION. 53 
 
 which this would intimate they would move in the 
 matter with a quickened conscience. 
 
 Apparently St. John was very much in earnest, 
 and Hewson would eagerly have lied out of it, he felt 
 in sudden depravity, from a just regard for St. John s 
 right to privacy in his own premises, but no lying, 
 not the boldest, not the most ingenious, could now 
 avail. Scores of people could witness that they had 
 heard Hewson tell the story at first hand ; at second 
 hand hundreds could still more confidently affirm its 
 truth. But if he admitted the truth of the fact and 
 denied merely that it had happened at St. Johnswort, 
 he would have Miss Hernshaw to deal with and what 
 could he hope from truth so relentless as hers ? She 
 was of a moral make so awful that if he ventured to 
 deny it without appeal for her support (which was 
 impossible), she was quite capable of denying his 
 denial. 
 
 He did the only thing he could. He wrote to St. 
 John declaring that the newspaper story, though 
 utterly false in its pretensions to be an inteiview with 
 him, was true in its essentials. The thing had really 
 happened, he had seen an apparition, and he had 
 seen it at St. Johnswort that morning when St. John 
 supposed his house to have been invaded by 
 
54 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 burglars. He vainly turned over a thousand depre 
 catory expressions in his mind, with which to soften 
 the blow but he let his letter go without including 
 
 one. 
 
X. 
 
 A WEEK of silence passed, and then one night St. 
 John himself appeared at Hewson s apartment. Hew- 
 son almost knew that it was his ring at the door, and 
 in the tremulous note of his voice asking the man if 
 he were at home, he recognized the great blubbery 
 fellow s most plaintive mood. 
 
 " Well, Hewson, " he whimpered, without staying 
 for any form of greeting when they stood face to 
 face, " this has been a terrible business for me. You 
 can t imagine how it s broken me up in every di 
 rection. " 
 
 " I I m afraid I can, St. John, " Hewson began, 
 but St. John cut him off. 
 
 " Oh, no, you can t. Look here ! " He showed a 
 handful of letters. " All from people who had prom 
 ised to stay with me, taking it back, since that 
 infernal interview of yours, or from people who hadn t 
 answered before, saying they can t come. Of course 
 
56 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 they make all sorts of civil excuses. I shouldn t 
 know what to do with these people if any of them 
 came. There isn t a servant left on the place, except 
 the gardener who lives in his own house, and the 
 groom who sleeps in the stable. For the last three 
 days I ve had to take my meals at that infernal inn 
 where you got your coffee. " 
 
 " Is it so bad as that ? " Hewson gasped. 
 
 "Yes, it is. It s so bad that sometimes I can t 
 realize it. Do you actually mean to tell me, Hewson 
 that you saw a ghost in my house ? " 
 
 " I never said a ghost. I said an apparition. I 
 don t know what it was. It may have been an optical 
 delusion. I call it an apparition, because that s the 
 shortest way out. You know I m not a spiritualist. " 
 
 "Yes, that s the devil of it," said St. John. 
 " That s the very thing that makes people believe it 
 is a ghost. There isn t one of them that don t say to 
 himself and the other fellows that if a cool, clear 
 headed chap like you saw something queer, it must 
 have been a ghost ; and so they go on knocking my 
 house down in price till I don t believe it would fetch 
 fifteen hundred under the hammer to-morrow. It s 
 simply ruin to me. " 
 
 " Ruin ? " Hewson echoed. 
 
HIS APPARITION. 57 
 
 " Yes, ruin, " St. John repeated. " Before this 
 thing caine out I refused twenty-five thousand for the 
 place, because I knew I could get twenty-eight thous 
 and. Now I couldn t get twenty-eight hundred. 
 Couldn t you understand that the reputation of being 
 haunted simply plays the devil with a piece of 
 property ? " 
 
 "Yes; yes, I did understand that, and for that 
 very reason I was always careful " 
 
 "Careful! To tell people that you had seen a 
 ghost in my house ? " 
 
 " No ! Not to tell them where 1 had seen a ghost. 
 I never " 
 
 "How did it get out then ? " 
 
 " I, " Hewson began, and then he stood with his 
 mouth open, unable to close it for the articulation of 
 the next word, which he at last huskily whispered 
 forth, " can t tell you. " 
 
 " Can t tell me ? " wailed St. John. " Well, I call 
 that pretty rough ! " 
 
 " It is rough, " Hewson admitted ; " and Heaven 
 knows that I would make it smooth if I could. I 
 never once except once only mentioned your place 
 in connection with the matter. I was scrupulously 
 careful not to do so, for I did imagine something like 
 
58 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 what has happened. I would do anything any 
 thing in reparation. But I can t even tell you how 
 the name of your place got out in the connection, 
 though certainly you have a right to ask and to know. 
 The circumstances were peculiar. The person was 
 one that I wouldn t have dreamt was capable of re 
 peating it. It was as if I had said the words over 
 to myself. " 
 
 " Well, I can t understand all that, " said St. John, 
 with rueful sulkiness, from which he brisked up to 
 ask, as if by a sudden inspiration, "If it was only to 
 one person, why couldn t you deny it, and throw the 
 onus on the other fellow ? " He looked up at Hew- 
 son, standing nerveless before him, from where he lay 
 mournfully wallowing in an easy-chair, as if now for 
 the first time, there might be a gleam of hope for 
 them both in some such notion. 
 
 Hewson slowly shook his head. " It wouldn t work. 
 The person isn t that kind of person." 
 
 " Why, but see here, " St. John urged. " There 
 must be something in the fellow that you can appeal 
 to. If you went and told him how it was playing 
 the very deuce with me pecuniarily, he would see the 
 necessity of letting you deny it, and taking the con 
 sequences, if he was anything of a man at all. " 
 
HIS APPARITION. 59 
 
 " He isn t anything of a man at all, " said Hewson, 
 in mechanical and melancholy parody. 
 
 "Then in Heaven s name what is he?" demanded 
 St. John, savagely. 
 
 " A woman. " 
 
 " Oh ! " St. John fell back in his chair. But he 
 pulled himself up again with a sudden renewal of 
 hope. " Why, see here ! If she s the right kind of 
 woman, she ll enjoy denying the story, and putting 
 the people in the wrong that have circulated it ! " 
 
 Hewson shook his head in rejection of the general 
 principle, while, as to the particular instance, he could 
 only say : " She isn t that kind. She s the kind that 
 would rather die herself, and let everybody else die, 
 than be party to any sort of deception. 
 
 "She must be a queer woman," St. John bewailed 
 himself, looking at the point of his cigar, and discov 
 ering to his surprise that it was out. He did not 
 attempt to light it. " Of course, I can t ask you who 
 she is ; but why shouldn t I see her, and try what / 
 can do with her? I m the one that s the principal 
 sufferer in this matter, " he added, perhaps seeing 
 refusal in Ilewson s troubled eye. 
 
 " Because for one reason she s in London. " 
 
 " Oh Lord ! " St. John lamented. 
 
60 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 " But if she were here in New York, I couldn t al 
 low it, " he continued. " It was in confidence 
 between us. " 
 
 " She doesn t seem to have thought so, " said St. 
 John, with sarcasm which Ilewson could not resent. 
 
 " There s only one thing for me to do, " said Hew- 
 son, who had been thinking the point over, and saw 
 no other way out for him as a gentleman, or even 
 merely as a just man. He was not rich, and in the 
 face of the mounting accumulations of other men he 
 had grown comparatively poor, without actually losing 
 money, since he had begun to lead the life which had 
 long been his ideal. After carefully ascertaining at 
 the time in question that he had sufficient income 
 from inherited means to live without his profession, 
 he had closed his law-office without shutting many 
 clients out, and had contributed himself to the forma 
 tion of a leisure class, which he conceived was 
 regrettably lacking in our conditions. He had taste, 
 he had reading, he had a pretty knowledge of the 
 world from travel, he had observed manners, and it 
 seemed to him that he might not immodestly pretend 
 to supply, as far as one man went, a well-recognized 
 want. 
 
 Hitherto he had been able te live up to his ideal 
 
HIS APPARITION. 61 
 
 with sufficient satisfaction, and in proposing to him 
 self never to marry, but to grow old gradually and 
 gracefully as a bachelor of adequate income, he saw 
 no difficulties in his way for the future, until this af 
 fair of the apparition. If now he incurred the chances 
 of an open change in his way of living the end was 
 simply a question of very little time. lie must not 
 only declass, he must depatriate himself, for he would 
 not have the means of living even much more econom 
 ically than he now lived in New York, if he did what 
 a sense of honor, of just responsibility urged him to 
 do with regard to St. John. 
 
 He would have been glad of any interposition of 
 Providence that would have availed him against his 
 obvious duty. He would have liked to recall the 
 words saying that there was only one thing for him 
 to do, but he could not recall them and he was forced 
 to go on. " Will you sell me your place ? " he said 
 to St. John, colorlessly. 
 
 " Sell you my place ? What do you mean ? " 
 
 " Simply that if you will, I shall be glad to buy it 
 at your own valuation. " 
 
 " Oh, look here, now, Hewson ! I can t let you do 
 this, " St. John began, trying to feel a magnanimity 
 which proved impossible to him. " What do you 
 
62 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 want with my place ? You couldn t get anybody to 
 live there with you. " 
 
 " I couldn t afford to live there in any case, " said 
 Hewson; "but I am entirely willing to risk the 
 purchase. " 
 
 Was it possible that Hewson knew something of 
 the neighborhood or its future, which encouraged him 
 to take the chances of the property appreciating in 
 value ? This thought passed through St. John s mind, 
 and he was not the man to let himself be overreached 
 in a deal. " The place ought to be worth thirty 
 thousand, " he said, for a bluff. 
 
 It was a relief for Hewson to feel ashamed of St. 
 John instead of himself, for a moment. " Very well, 
 I ll give you thirty thousand. " 
 
 St. John examined himself for a responsive generos 
 ity. The most he could say was, "You re doing this 
 because of what I d said. " 
 
 " What does it matter ? I make you a bonafide 
 offer. I will give you thirty thousand dollars for St. 
 Johnswort, " said Hewson, haughtily. " I ask you 
 to sell me that place. I cannot see that it will ever 
 be any good to me, but I can assure you that it would 
 be a far worse burden for me to carry round the sense 
 of having injured you, however unwillingly God 
 
HIS APPARITION. 63 
 
 knows I never meant you harm ! than to shoulder 
 the chance of your place remaining worthless on my 
 hands. " 
 
 St. John caught at the hope which the form of 
 words suggested. " If anything can bring it up, it 
 will be the fact that you have bought it. Such a 
 thing would give the lie to that ridiculous story, as 
 nothing else could. Every one will see that a house 
 can t be very badly haunted, if the man that the 
 ghost appeared to is willing to buy it. " 
 
 " Perhaps, " said Hewson sadly. 
 
 " No perhaps about it, " St. John retorted, all the 
 more cheerfully because he would have been glad be 
 fore this incident to take twenty thousand for his 
 place. " It s just on the borders of Lenox, and it s 
 bound to come up when this blows over. " He talked 
 on for a time in an encouraging strain, while Hewson, 
 standing with his back against the mantel, looked 
 absently down upon him. St. John was inwardly 
 struggling through all to say that Hewson might have 
 the property for twenty-eight thousand, but he could 
 not. Possibly he made himself believe that he was 
 letting it go a great bargain at thirty ; at any rate he 
 ended by saying, " Well, it s yours if you really 
 mean it. " 
 
64 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 " I mean it, " said Ilewson. 
 
 St. John floundered up out of his chair with seal- 
 like struggles. " Do you want the furniture ? " he 
 panted. 
 
 u The furniture ? Yes, why not ? " said Hewson. 
 He did not seem to know what he was saying, or to 
 care. 
 
 " I will put that in for a mere nominal considera 
 tion the rugs alone are worth the money say a 
 thousand more. " 
 
 Hewson s man came in with a note. " The mes 
 senger is waiting, sir, " he said. 
 
 Hewson was aware of wondering that he had not 
 heard any ring. " Will you excuse me ? " he said, 
 toward St. John. 
 
 " By all means, " said St. John. 
 
 Hewson opened the note, and read it with an ex 
 pression which can only be described as a radiant 
 frown. He sat down at his desk, and wrote an an 
 swer to the note, and gave it to his man, who was still 
 waiting. Then he said to St. John, " What did you 
 say the rugs were worth ? " 
 
 " A thousand. " 
 
 " I ll take them. And what do you want for the 
 rest of the furniture ? " 
 
HIS APPARITION. 65 
 
 Clearly he had not understood that the furniture, 
 rugs, and all, had been offered to him for a thousand 
 dollars. But what was a man in St. John s place to 
 do ? As it was he was turning himself out of house 
 and home for Hewson, and that was sacrifice enough. 
 He hesitated, sighed deeply, and then said, " Well, I 
 will throw all that in for a couple of thousand more. " 
 
 "All right," said Hewson, "I will give it. Have 
 the papers made out and I will have the money ready 
 at once. " 
 
 " Oh, there s no hurry about that, my dear fellow, " 
 said St. John, handsomely. 
 
XL 
 
 HEWSON S note was from Mrs. Rock, asking him to 
 breakfast with her at the Walholland the next morn 
 ing. She said that they were just off the steamer, 
 which had got in late, and they had started so sudden 
 ly from London that she had not had time to write 
 and have her apartment opened. She came to business 
 in the last sentence where she said that Miss Hernshaw 
 joined her in kind remembrances, and wished her to 
 say that he must not fail them, or if he could not 
 come to breakfast, to let them know at what hour 
 during the day he would be kind enough to call ; it 
 was very important they should see him at the earliest 
 possible moment. 
 
 Hewson instantly decided that this summons was 
 related to the affair of his apparition, without imagin 
 ing how or why, and when Miss Hernshaw met him, 
 and almost before she could say that Mrs. Rock would 
 be down in a moment, began with it, he made no feint 
 of having come for anything else. 
 
\VHY, THERE ISN T ANY PUNISHMENT SEVERE ENOUGH 
 FOR A CRIME LIKE THAT " 
 
HIS APPARITION. 67 
 
 As he entered the door of Mrs. Rock s parlor, where 
 the breakfast table was laid, the girl came swiftly to 
 ward him, with the air of having turned from watch 
 ing for him at the window. " Well, what do you 
 think of me 1 " she demanded as soon as she had got 
 over Mrs. Rock s excuses for having her receive him. 
 He had of course to repeat, " What do I think of 
 you ? " but he knew perfectly what she meant. 
 
 She disdained to help him pretend that he did not 
 know. " It was I who told that horrible woman about 
 your experience at St. Johnswort. I didn t dream 
 that she was an interviewer, but that doesn t excuse 
 me, and I am willing to take any punishment for my 
 I don t know what to call it mischief. " 
 
 She was so intensely ready, so magnificently pre 
 pared for the stake, if that should be her sentence, 
 that Hewson could not help laughing. " Why there 
 isn t any punishment severe enough for a crime like 
 that, " he began, but she would not allow him to trifle 
 with the matter. 
 
 " Oh, I didn t think you would be so uncandid ! 
 The instant I read that interview I made Mrs. Rock 
 get ready to come. And we started the first steamer. 
 It seemed to me that I could not eat or sleep, till I 
 had seen you and told you what I had done and 
 
 5 
 
68 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 taken the consequences. And now do you think it 
 right to turn it off as a joke ? " 
 
 " I don t wish to make a joke of it, " said Hewson, 
 gravely, in compliance with her mood. " But I don t 
 understand, quite, how you could have got the story 
 over there in time for you " 
 
 "It was cabled to their London edition that s 
 what it said in the paper ; and by this time they must 
 have it in Australia, " said Miss Hemshaw, with un 
 relieved severity. 
 
 " Oh ! " said Hewson, giving himself time to realize 
 that he was the psychical hero of two hemispheres. 
 " Well, " he resumed " what do you expect me to 
 say?" 
 
 " I don t know what I expect. I expected you to 
 say something without my prompting you. You know 
 that it was outrageous for me to talk about your ap 
 parition without your leave, and to be the means of 
 its getting into the newspapers. " 
 
 " I m not sure you were the means. I have told 
 the story a hundred times, myself. " 
 
 " But that doesn t excuse me. You knew the kind 
 of people to tell it to, and I didn t. " 
 
 " Oh, I am afraid I was willing to tell it to all kinds 
 of people to any kind that would listen. " 
 
HIS APPARITION. 69 
 
 " You are trying to evade me, Mr. Hewson, " she 
 said, with a severity he found charming. " I didn t 
 expect that of you. " 
 
 The appeal was not lost upon Hewson. "What 
 do you want me to say ? " 
 
 " I want you, " said Miss Hernshaw, with an effect 
 of giving him another trial, " to say to acknowledge 
 that you were terribly annoyed by that interview. " 
 
 " If you will excuse me from attaching the slight 
 est blame to you for it, I will acknowledge that I was 
 annoyed. " 
 
 Miss Hernshaw drew a deep breath as of relief. 
 " I will arrange about the blame, " she said loftily. 
 " And now I wish to tell you how I never supposed 
 that girl was an interviewer. We were all together 
 at an artist s house in Rome, and after dinner, we got 
 to telling ghost-stories, the way people do, around the 
 fire, and I told mine yours I mean. And before we 
 broke up, this girl came to me it was while we were 
 putting on our wraps and introduced herself, and 
 said how much she had been impressed by my story 
 of course, I mean your story and she said she 
 supposed it was made up. I said I should not dream 
 of making up a thing of that kind, and that it was 
 every word true, and I had heard the person it hap- 
 
70 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 pened to tell it himself. I don t know ! I was vain 
 of having heard it, so, at first hand. " 
 
 " I can understand, " said Hewson, sadly. 
 
 " And then I told her who the person was, and 
 where it happened and about the burglary. You 
 can t imagine how silly people get when they begin 
 going in that direction. " 
 
 " I am afraid I can, " said Hewson. 
 
 " She seemed very grateful somehow ; I couldn t 
 see why, but I didn t ask; and then I didn t think 
 about it again till I saw it in that awful newspaper. 
 She sent it to me herself ; she was such a simpleton ; 
 she thought I would actually like to see it. She 
 must have written it down, and sent it to the paper, 
 and they printed it when they got ready to; she 
 needed the money, I suppose. Then I began to won 
 der what you would say, when you remembered how 
 I blamed you for telling the same story only not 
 half so bad at that dinner. " 
 
 " I always felt you were quite right, " said Ilew- 
 son. " I have always thanked you in my own mind 
 for being so frank with me. " 
 
 "Well, and what do you think now, when you 
 know that I was ten times as bad as you ten times 
 as foolish and vulgar ! " 
 
HIS APPARITION. 71 
 
 " I haven t had time to formulate my ideas yet, " 
 Hewson urged. 
 
 " You know perfectly well that you despise me. 
 Can you say that I had any right to give your name ? " 
 
 "It must have got out sooner or later. I never 
 asked any one not to mention my name when I told 
 the story " 
 
 " I see that you think I took a liberty, and I did. 
 But that s nothing. That isn t the point. How I do 
 keep beating about the bush ! Mrs. Rock says it was 
 a great deal worse to tell where it happened, for that 
 would give the place the reputation of being haunted 
 and nobody could ever live there afterwards, for they 
 couldn t keep servants, even if they didn t have the 
 creeps themselves, and it would ruin the property. " 
 
 Hewson had not been able, when she touched upon 
 this point, to elude the keen eye with which she read 
 his silent thought. 
 
 " Is that true ? " she demanded. 
 
 " Oh, no ; oh, no, " he began, but he could not 
 frame in plausible terms the lies he would have ut 
 tered. He only succeeded in saying, " Those things 
 soon blow over. " 
 
 " Then how, " she said, sternly, " does it happen 
 that in every town and village, almost, there are houses 
 
72 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 that you can hardly hire anybody to live in, because 
 people say they are haunted ? No, Mr. Hewson, it s 
 very kind of you, and I appreciate it, but you can t 
 make me believe that it will ever blow over, about 
 St. Johnswort. Have you heard from Mr. St. John 
 since ? " 
 
 " Yes, " Hewson was obliged to own. 
 
 "And was he very much troubled about it? I 
 should think he was a man that would be, from the 
 way he behaved about the burglary. Was he ? " she 
 persisted, seeing that Hewson hesitated. 
 
 " Yes, I must say he was. " 
 
 There was a sound of walking to arid fro in the 
 adjoining room, a quick shutting as of trunk-lids, a 
 noise as of a skirt shaken out, and steps advanced to 
 the door. Miss Hernshaw ran to it and turned the 
 key in the lock. " Not yet, Mrs. Rock, " she called 
 to the unseen presence within, and she explained to 
 Hewson, as she faced him again, " She promised that 
 I should have it all out with you myself, and now I m 
 not going to have her in here, interrupting. Well, 
 did he write to you ? " 
 
 " Yes, he wrote to me. He wanted me to deny 
 the story." 
 
 " And did you ? " 
 
HIS APPARITION. 73 
 
 " Of course not ! " said Hewson, with, a note of in 
 dignation. " It was true. Besides it wouldn t have 
 been of any use. " 
 
 " No, it would have been wicked and it would have 
 been useless. And then what did he say ? " 
 
 " Nothing. " 
 
 " Nothing ? And you have never heard another 
 word from him ? " 
 
 " Yes, he came to see me last night. " 
 
 " Here in New York ? Is he here yet ? " 
 
 " I suppose so. " 
 
 " Where ? " 
 
 " I believe at the Overpark. " 
 
 Miss Hernshaw caught her breath, as if she were 
 going to speak, but she did not say anything. 
 
 " Why do you insist upon all this, Miss Hernshaw ? " 
 he entreated. " It can do you no good to follow the 
 matter up ! " 
 
 " Do you think I want to do myself good ? " she 
 returned. " I want to do myself harm! What did 
 he say when he came to see you ? " 
 
 " Well, you can imagine, " said Hewson, not able 
 to keep out of his tone the lingering disgust he felt 
 for St. John. 
 
 " He complained ? " 
 
74 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 " He all but shed tears, " said Hewson, recalled to 
 a humorous sense of St. John s behavior. " I felt 
 sorry for him ; though, " he added, darkly, " I can t 
 say that I do now. " 
 
 Miss Hernshaw didn t seek to fathom the mystery 
 of his closing words. " Had he been actually incon 
 venienced by that thing in the paper ? " 
 
 " Yes somewhat. " 
 
 " How much ? " 
 
 " Oh, " Hewson groaned. " If you must know " 
 
 " I must ! The worst ! " 
 
 " It had fairly turned him out of house and home. 
 His servants had all left him, and he had been re 
 duced to taking his meals at the inn. He showed me 
 a handful of letters from people whom he had asked 
 to visit him, withdrawing their acceptances, or making 
 excuses for not accepting. " 
 
 " Ah ! " said Miss Hernshaw, with a deep, inward 
 breath, as if this now were indeed something like the 
 punishment she had expected. " And will it did he 
 think did he say anything about the pecuniary ef 
 fect the whether it would hurt the property ? " 
 
 " He seemed to think it would, " answered Hewson, 
 reluctantly, and he added, unfortunately for his gener 
 ous purpose, " I really can t enter upon that part. " 
 
HIS APPARITION. 75 
 
 She arched her eyebrows in grieved surprise. " But 
 that is the very part that I want you to enter upon 
 Mr. Hewson. You must tell me, now ! Did he say 
 that it had injured the property very much ? " 
 
 " He did, but" 
 
 " But what ? " 
 
 " I think St. John is a man to put the worst face on 
 that matter." 
 
 " You are saying that to keep me from feeling 
 badly. But I ought to feel badly I wish to feel 
 badly. I suppose he said that it wasn t worth any 
 thing now. " 
 
 " Something of that sort, " Ilewson helplessly ad 
 mitted. 
 
 " Very well, then, I will buy it for whatever he 
 chooses to ask ! " With the precipitation which char 
 acterized all her actions, Miss Hernshaw rose from the 
 chair in which she had been provisionally sitting, 
 pushed an electric button in the wall, swirled away to 
 the other side of the room, unlocked the door behind 
 which those sounds had subsided, and flinging it open, 
 said, " You can come out, Mrs. Rock ; I ve rung for 
 breakfast. " 
 
 Mrs. Rock came smoothly forth, with her vague 
 eyes wandering over every other object in the room, 
 
76 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 till they rested upon Hewson, directly before her. 
 Then she gave him her hand, and asked, with a smile, 
 as if taking him into the joke. " Well, has Rosalie 
 had it out with you ? " 
 
 " I have had it out with him, Mrs. Rock, " Miss 
 Hernshaw answered, " and I will tell you all about it 
 later. Now I want my breakfast " 
 
XII. 
 
 HEWSON ate the meal before him, and it was a 
 very good one, as from time to time he noted, in a 
 daze which was as strange a confusion of the two 
 consciousnesses as he had ever experienced. What 
 ever the convention was between Miss Hernshaw and 
 Mrs. Rock with regard to the matter in hand, or lately 
 in hand, it dropped, after a few uninterested inquiries 
 from Mrs. Rock, who was satisfied, or seemed so, to 
 know that Miss Hernshaw had got at the worst. She 
 led the talk to other things, like the comparative 
 comforts and discomforts of the line to Genoa and 
 the line to Liverpool; and Hewson met her upon 
 these polite topics with an apparent fulness of inter 
 est that would have deceived a much more attentive 
 listener. 
 
 All the time he was arguing with Miss Hernshaw 
 in his nether consciousness, pleading with her to keep 
 her away from the fact that he had himself bought 
 
78 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 St. Jolinswort, until lie could frame some fitting form 
 in which to tell her that lie had bought it. With his 
 outward eyes, he saw her drooping on the opposite 
 side of the table, and in spite of her declaration that 
 she wanted her breakfast, making nothing of it, after 
 the preliminary melon, while to his inward vision she 
 was passionately refusing, by every charming perver 
 sity, to be tempted away from the subject. 
 
 As the Cunard boats always get in on Saturday, 
 this morrow of their arrival was naturally Sunday ; 
 and after a while Hewson fancied symptoms of going 
 to church in Mrs. Rock. She could not have become 
 more vague than she ordinarily was, but her wander 
 ings were of a kind of devotional character. She 
 spoke of the American church in Rome, and asked 
 Hewson if he knew the rector. Then, when he said 
 he was afraid he was keeping her from going to 
 church, she said she did not know whether Rosalie 
 intended going. At the same time she rose from the 
 table, and Hewson found that he should not be 
 allowed to sit down again, unless by violence. He 
 had to go away, and he went, as little at ease in his 
 mind as he very well could be. 
 
 He was no sooner out of the house than he felt the 
 necessity of returning. He did not know how or 
 
HIS APPARITION. 79 
 
 when Miss Hernshaw would write to St. John, but 
 that she would do so, he did not at all doubt, 
 and then, when the truth came out, what would she 
 think of him ? He did not think her a very wise 
 person ; she seemed to him rather a wild and whirling 
 person in her ideals of conduct, an unbridled and un 
 disciplined person; and yet he was aware of pro 
 foundly and tenderly respecting her as a creature of 
 the most inexpugnable innocence and final goodness. 
 He could not bear to have her feel that he had trifled 
 with her. There had not been many meetings 
 between them, but each meeting had been of such 
 event that it had advanced their acquaintance far 
 beyond the point that it could have reached through 
 weeks of ordinary association. From the first there 
 had been that sort of intimacy which exists between 
 spirits which encounter in the region of absolute 
 sincerity. She had never used the least of those arts 
 which women use in concealing the candor of their 
 natures from men unworthy of it ; she had not only 
 practiced her rule of instant and constant veracity, 
 but had avowed it, and as it were, invited his judg 
 ment of it. Hitherto, he had met her half-way at 
 least, but now he was in the coil of a disingenuousness 
 which must more and more trammel him from her, 
 
80 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 unless he found some way to declare the fact to her. 
 
 This ought to have been an easy matter, but it was 
 not easy ; upon reflection it grew rather more 
 difficult. Ilewson did not see how he could avow the 
 fact, which he wished to avow, without intolerable 
 awkwardness ; without the effect of boasting, without 
 putting upon her a burden which he had no right to 
 put. To be sure, she had got herself in for it all by 
 her divine imprudence, but she had owned her error 
 in that as promptly as if it had been the blame of 
 some one else. Still Hewson doubted whether her 
 magnanimity was large enough to go round in the 
 case of a man who tried to let his magnanimity come 
 upon her with any sort of dramatic surprise. This 
 was what he must seem to be doing if he now left 
 her to learn from another how he had kept St. John 
 from loss by himself assuming the chance of depre 
 ciation in his property. But if he went and told her 
 that he had done it, how much better for him would 
 that be 2 
 
 He took a long, unhappy walk up into the Park, 
 and then he walked back to the Walholland. By 
 this time he thought Mrs. Rock and Miss Hernshaw 
 must have been to church, but he had not the courage 
 to send up his name to them. He waited about in 
 
HIS APPARITION. 81 
 
 the region of the dining-room, in the senseless hope 
 that it would be better for him to surprise them on 
 their way to luncheon, and trust to some chance for 
 introducing his confession, than to seek a direct inter 
 view with Miss Hernshaw. But they did not come 
 to luncheon, and hen Hewson had the clerk send up 
 his card. 
 
 Word came back that the ladies would see him, and 
 he followed the messenger to Mrs. Rock s apartment, 
 where if he was surprised, he was not disappointed 
 to be received by Miss Hernshaw alone. 
 
 "Mrs. Eock is lying down, " she explained, " but I 
 thought that it might be something important, and 
 you would not mind seeing me. " 
 
 " Not at all, " said Hewson, with what seemed to 
 him afterwards superfluous politeness, and then they 
 both waited until he could formulate his business, 
 Miss Hernshaw drooping forward, and looking down 
 in a way that he had found was most characteristic of 
 her. " It is something important at least it is im 
 portant to me. Miss Hernshaw, may I ask whether 
 you have done anything it seems a very unwarranta 
 ble question about St. Johnswort ? " 
 
 " About buying it ? " 
 
 " Yes. It will be useless to make any offer for it. " 
 
82 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 " Why will it be useless to do that ? " 
 
 " Because because I have bought it myself. " 
 
 " You have bought it ? " 
 
 "Yes; when he came to me last night, and made 
 those representations Well, in short, I have bought 
 the place." 
 
 " To save him from losing money by that story ? " 
 
 "Well yes. I ought to have told you the fact 
 this morning, as soon as you said you would buy the 
 place. I know that you like people to be perfectly 
 truthful. But I couldn t without seeming to 
 brag. " 
 
 " I understand, " said Miss Hernshaw. 
 
 " I took the risk of your writing to St. John ; but 
 then I realized that if he answered and told you what 
 I ought to have told you myself, it would make it 
 worse, and I came back. " 
 
 " I don t know whether it would have made it 
 worse ; but you have come too late, " said Miss Hern 
 shaw. " I ve just written to Mr. St. John. " 
 
 They were both silent for what llewson thought a 
 long time. At the end of it, he asked, " Did you 
 you must excuse me refer to me at all ? " 
 
 " No, certainly not. Why should I ? " 
 
 " I don t know. I don t know that it would have 
 
HIS ArPAKlTION. 83 
 
 mattered. " He was silent again, with bowed head ; 
 when he looked up he saw tears in the girl s eyes. 
 
 " I suppose you know where this leaves me ?" she 
 said gently. 
 
 " I can t pretend that I don t," answered Hewson. 
 " What can I do ? " 
 
 " You can sell me the place for what it cost you. " 
 
 " Oh, no, I can t do that, " said Hewson. 
 
 " Why do you say that ? It isn t as if I were poor ; 
 but even then you wouldn t have the right to refuse 
 me if I insisted. It was my fault that it ever came 
 out about St. Johnswort. It might have come out 
 about you, but the harm to Mr. St. John I did that, 
 and why should you take it upon yourself ? " 
 
 " Because I was really to blame from the beginning 
 to the end. If it had not been for my pitiful wish to 
 shine as the confidant of mystery, nothing would have 
 been known of the affair. Even when you asked me 
 that night if it had not happened at St. Johnswort, I 
 know now that I had a wretched triumph in saying 
 that it had, and I was so full of this that I did not 
 think to caution you against repeating what I had 
 owned. " 
 
 " Yes, " said the girl, with her unsparing honesty, 
 " if you had given me any hint, I would not have told 
 
 6 
 
84 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 for the world. Of course I did not think a girl 
 wouldn t of the effect it would have on the property. " 
 
 " No, you wouldn t think of that, " said Hewson. 
 Though he agreed with her, he would have preferred 
 that she should continue to blame herself ; but he 
 took himself severely in hand again. " So, you see, 
 the fault was altogether mine, and if there is to be 
 any penalty it ought to fall upon me. " 
 
 "Yes," said Miss Hernshaw, "and if there has 
 been a fault there ought to be a penalty, don t you 
 think ? It would have been no penalty for me to buy 
 St. Johnswort. My father wouldn t have minded it. " 
 She blushed suddenly, and added, " I don t mean 
 that You may be so rich that I think I had bet 
 ter stop. " 
 
 " No, no ! " said Hewson, amused, and glad of the 
 relief. " Go on. I will tell you anything you wish 
 to know. " 
 
 " I don t wish to know anything, " said Miss Hern 
 shaw, haughtily. 
 
 Her words seemed to put an end to an interview 
 for which there was no longer any excuse. 
 
 Hewson rose. " Good-by, " he said, and he was 
 rather surprised at her putting out her hand, but he 
 took it gratefully. " Will you make my adieux to 
 
HIS APPARITION. 85 
 
 Mrs. Rock ? And excuse my coming a second time 
 to trouble you ! " 
 
 " I don t see how you could have helped coming, " 
 said Miss Hernshaw, " when you thought I might 
 write to Mr. St. John at once. " 
 
 Whether this implied excuse or greater blame, 
 Hewson had to go away with it as her final response, 
 and he went away certainly in as great discomfort as 
 he had come. He did not feel quite well used ; it 
 seemed to him that hard measure had been dealt him 
 on all sides, but especially by Miss Hernshaw. After 
 her futile effort at reparation to St. John she had ap 
 parently withdrawn from all responsibility in the 
 matter. He did not know when he was to see her 
 again, if ever, and he did not know what he was to 
 wait for, if anything. 
 
 Still he had the sense of waiting for something, or 
 for some one, and he went home to wait. There he 
 perceived that it was for St. John, who did not keep 
 him waiting long. His nervous ring roused Hewson 
 half an hour after his return, and St. John came in 
 with a look in his greedy eyes which Hewson rightly 
 interpreted at the first glance. 
 
 " See here, Hewson, " St. John said, with his habit 
 ual lack of manners, " I don t want to get you in for 
 
86 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 this thing at St. Johns wort. I know why you offered 
 to buy the place, and though- of course you are the 
 original cause of the trouble, I don t feel that it s 
 quite fair to let you shoulder the consequences al 
 together. " 
 
 " Have I been complaining? " Hewson asked, dryly. 
 
 " No, and that s just it. You ve behaved like a 
 little man through it all, and I don t like to take ad 
 vantage of you. If you want to rue your bargain, I ll 
 call it off. I ve had some fresh light on the matter, 
 and I believe I can let you off without loss to myself. 
 So that if it s me you re considering 
 
 u What s your fresh light? " asked Ilewson. 
 
 " Well," said St. John, and he swallowed rather 
 hard, as if it were a pill, " the fact is, I ve had another 
 offer for the place. " 
 
 " A better one ? " 
 
 " Well, I don t know that I can say that it is, " 
 answered St. John, saving his conscience in the form 
 of the words. 
 
 Hewson knew that he was lying, and he had no 
 mercy on him. " Then I believe I ll stick to my bar 
 gain. You say that the other party hasn t bettered 
 my offer, and so I needn t withdraw on your account. 
 I m not bound to withdraw for any other reason. " 
 
HIS APPARITION. 87 
 
 " No, of course not. " St. John rubbed his chin, 
 as if hesitating to eat his words, however unpalatable ; 
 but in the end he seemed not to find it possible. 
 "Well, " he said, disgustedly, as he floundered up to 
 take his leave, " I thought I ought to come and give 
 you the chance. " 
 
 " It s very nice of you, " said Hewson, with a smile 
 that made itself a derisive grin in spite of him, and a 
 laugh of triumph when the door had closed upon 
 St. John. 
 
XTII. 
 
 AFTER the first flush of Hewson s triumph had 
 passed he began to enjoy it less, and by-and-by he did 
 not enjoy it at all. He had done right not only in 
 keeping St. John from plundering Miss Hernshaw, 
 but in standing firm and taking the punishment which 
 ought to fall upon him and not on her. But the sense 
 of having done right sufficed him no more than the 
 sense of having got the better of St. John. What 
 was lacking to him ? In the casuistry of the moment, 
 which was perhaps rather emotional than rational, it 
 appeared to Hewson that he had again a duty toward 
 Miss Hernshaw, and that his feeling of dissatisfaction 
 was the first effect of its non-fulfilment. But it was 
 clearly impossible that he should go again to see her, 
 and tell her what had passed between him and St. 
 John, and it was clearly impossible that he should 
 write and tell her what it was quite as clearly her right 
 to know from him. If he went to her, or wrote to 
 
HIS APPARITION. 89 
 
 her, he felt himself in danger of wanting to shine in 
 the affair, as her protector against the rapacity of St. 
 John, and as the man of superior quality who had 
 outwitted a greedy fellow. The fear that she might 
 not admire his splendor in either sort caused him to 
 fall somewhat nervelessly back upon Providence ; but 
 if the moral government of the universe finally favored 
 him it was not by traversing any of its own laws. 
 By the time he had determined to achieve both the 
 impossibilities which formed his dilemma had de 
 cided to write to Miss Hernshaw and call upon her, 
 and leave his letter in the event of failing to find her 
 his problem was as far solved as it might be, by the 
 arrival of a note from Miss Hernshaw herself, hoping 
 that he would come to see her on business of pressing 
 importance. 
 
 She received him without any pretence of Mrs. 
 Rock s intermediary presence, and put before him a 
 letter which she had received, before writing him, 
 from St. John, and which she could not answer with 
 out first submitting it to him. It was a sufficiently 
 straightforward expression of his regret that he could 
 not accept her very generous offer for St. Johnswort 
 because the place was already sold. He had the taste 
 to forbear any allusion to the motives which (she told 
 
90 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 Hewson) she had said prompted her offer ; but then 
 he became very darkling and sinuous in a suggestion 
 that if Miss Hernshaw wished to have her offer known 
 as hers to the purchaser of St. Johnswort he would 
 be happy to notify him of it. 
 
 " You see, " she eagerly commented to Hewson, 
 " he does not give your name ; but I know who it is, 
 though I did not know when I made him my offer. 
 I must answer his letter now, and what shall I say ? 
 Shall I tell him I know who it is ? I should like to ; 
 I hate all concealments ! Will it do any harm to tell 
 him I know ? " 
 
 Hewson reflected. " I don t see how it can. I 
 was trying to come to you, when I got your note, to 
 say that St. John had been to see me, and offered to 
 release me from my offer, because, as I thought, you 
 had made him a better one. He s amusingly rapa 
 cious, St. John is. " 
 
 " And what did you I beg your pardon ! " 
 " Oh, not at all. I said I would stand to my offer. " 
 She repressed, apparently, some form of protest, 
 and presently asked, " And what shall I say ? " 
 
 " Oh, if you like, that you have learned who the 
 purchaser of St. Johnswort is, and that you know he 
 will not give way. " 
 
HIS APPARITION. 91 
 
 " Well ! " she said, with a quick sigh, as of disap 
 pointment. After an indefinite pause, she asked, 
 " Shall you be going to St. Johiiswort? " 
 
 " Why, I don t know, " Hewson answered. " I had 
 thought of going to Europe. But, yes, I think I shall 
 go to St. Johnswort, first, at any rate. One can t sim 
 ply turn one s back on a piece of real estate in that 
 way, " he said, recognizing a fact that would doubtless 
 have presented itself in due order for his considera 
 tion. " My one notion was to forget it as quickly as 
 possible. " 
 
 " I should not think you would want to do that, " 
 said the girl, seriously. 
 
 " No, one oughtn t to neglect an investment. " 
 
 " I don t mean that. But if such a thing had hap 
 pened to me, there, I should want to go again and 
 again. " 
 
 " You mean the apparition ? Did I tell you how I 
 had always had the expectation that I should see it 
 again, and perhaps understand it ? But when I had 
 behaved so shabbily about it, I began to feel that it 
 would not come again. " 
 
 " If I were in your place, " said the girl, " I should 
 never give up ; I should spend my whole life trying 
 to find out what it meant. " 
 
92 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 " Ah ! " lie sighed. " I wish you could put your 
 self in my place. " 
 
 " I wish I could, " she returned, intensely. 
 
 They looked into each other s faces. 
 
 " Miss Hernshaw, " he demanded, solemnly, " do 
 you really like people to say what they think ? " 
 
 " Of course I do ! " 
 
 " Then I wish you would come to St. Johnswort 
 with me ! " 
 
 " Would that do ? " she asked. " If Mrs. Rock " 
 
 He saw how far she was from taking his meaning, 
 but he pushed on. "I don t want Mrs. Rock. I 
 want you you alone. Don t you understand me ? I 
 love you. I of course it s ridiculous ! We ve only 
 met three or four times in our lives, but I knew this 
 as well the first moment as I do now. I knew it 
 when you came walking across the garden that morn 
 ing, and I haven t known it any better since, and I 
 couldn t in a thousand years. But of course " 
 
 " Sit down, " she said, wafting herself into a chair, 
 and he obeyed her. " I should have to tell my fath 
 er, " she began. 
 
 " Why, certainly, " and he sprang to his feet again. 
 
 She commanded him to his chair with an imperative 
 gesture. " I have got to find out what I think, first, 
 
HIS APPARITION. 93 
 
 myself. If I were sure that I loved you but I don t 
 know. I believe you are good. I believed that when 
 they were all joking you there at breakfast, and you 
 took it so nicely ; I have always believed that you 
 were good. " 
 
 She seemed to be appealing to him for confirmation, 
 but he could not very well say that she was right, and 
 he kept silent. " I didn t like your telling that story 
 at the dinner, and I said so ; and then I went and did 
 the same thing, or worse ; so that I have nothing to 
 say about that. And I think you have behaved very 
 nobly to Mr. St. John. " As if at some sign of protest 
 in Hewson, she insisted, " Yes, I do ! But all this 
 doesn t prove that I love you." Again she seemed to 
 appeal to him, and this time he thought he might 
 answer her appeal. 
 
 " I couldn t prove that / love you, but I feel sure 
 of it. " 
 
 " And do you believe that we ought to take our 
 feelings for a guide ? " 
 
 " That s what people do, " he ventured, with the 
 glimmer of a smile in his eyes, which she was fixing 
 so earnestly with her own. 
 
 " I am not satisfied that it is the right way, " she 
 answered. " If there is really such a thing as love 
 
94 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 there ought to be some way of finding it out besides 
 our feelings. Don t you think it s a thing we ought 
 to talk sensibly about ? " 
 
 " Of all things in the world ; though it isn t the 
 custom. " 
 
 Miss Hernshaw was silent for a moment. Then she 
 said, " I believe I should like a little time. " 
 
 " Oh, I didn t expect you to answer me at once, I " 
 
 " But if you are going to Europe ? " 
 
 " I needn t go to Europe at all. I can go to St. 
 Johnswort, and wait for your answer there. " 
 
 " It might be a good while, " she urged. " I 
 should want to tell my father that I was thinking 
 about it, and he would want to see you before he 
 approved. " 
 
 " Why, of course ! " 
 
 " Not, " she added, " that it would make any dif 
 ference, if I was sure of it myself. Pie has always 
 said that he would not try to control me in such a 
 matter, and I think he would like you. I do like you 
 very much myself, Mr. Hewson, but I don t think it 
 would be right to say I loved you unless I could 
 prove it. " 
 
 Hewson was tempted to say that she could prove 
 it by marrying him, but he had not the heart to mock 
 
HIS APPARITION. 95 
 
 a scruple which he felt to be sacred. What he did 
 say was : " Then I will wait till you can prove it. Do 
 you wish me not to see you again, before you have 
 made up your mind ? " 
 
 " I don t know. I can t see what harm there would 
 be in our meeting. " 
 
 " No, I can t, either, " said Hewson, as she seemed 
 to refer the point to him. " Should you mind my 
 coming again, say, this evening ? " 
 
 " To-night ? " She reflected a moment. " Yes, 
 come to-night. " 
 
 When he came after dinner, Hewson was sensible 
 from the perfect unconsciousness of Mrs. Rock s man 
 ner that Miss Hernshaw had been telling her. Her 
 habit of a wandering eye, contributed to the effect 
 she wished to produce, if this were the effect, and her 
 success was such that it might easily have deceived 
 herself. But when Mrs. Rock, in a supreme exercise 
 of her unconsciousness, left him with the girl for a 
 brief interval before it was time for him to go, Miss 
 Hernshaw said, u Mrs. Rock knows about it, and she 
 says that the best way for me to find out will be to 
 try whether I can live without you. " 
 
 "Was that Mrs, Rock s idea?" asked Hewson, as 
 gravely as he could. 
 
96 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 " No it was mine ; I suggested it to her ; but she 
 approves of it. Don t you like it ? " 
 
 " Yes. I hope I sha n t die while you are trying to 
 live without me. Shall you he very long ? " She 
 frowned, and he hastened to say, " I do like your 
 idea ; it s the best way, and I thank you for giving 
 me a chance. " 
 
 "We are going out to my father s ranch in Colo 
 rado, at once, " she explained. " We shall start 
 to-morrow morning. " 
 
 " Oh ! May I come to see you off ? " 
 
 " No, I would rather begin at once. " 
 
 " May I write to you ? 
 
 " I will write to you when I ve decided. " 
 
 She gave him her hand, but she would not allow 
 him to keep it for more than farewell, and then she 
 made him stay till Mrs. Rock came back, and take 
 leave of her too ; he had frankly forgotten Mrs. Rock, 
 who bade him adieu with averted eyes, and many 
 civilities about seeing him again. She could hardly 
 have been said to be seeing him then. 
 
XIV. 
 
 THE difficulties of domestication at St. Johnswort 
 Lad not been misrepresented by the late proprietor, 
 Hewson found, when he went to take possession of 
 his estate. He thought it right in engaging servants 
 to say openly that the place had the reputation of 
 being haunted, and if he had not thought it right he 
 would have thought it expedient, for he knew that if 
 he had concealed the fact it would have been discov 
 ered to them within twenty-four hours of their arrival. 
 His declaration was sufficient at once with most, who 
 recoiled from his service as if he had himself been a 
 ghost ; with one or two sceptics who seemed willing 
 to take the risks (probably in a guilty consciousness 
 of records that would have kept them out of other 
 employ) his confession that he had himself seen the 
 spectre which haunted St. Johnswort, was equally 
 effective. He prevailed at last against the fact and 
 his own testimony with a Japanese, who could not be 
 
98 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 made to understand the objection to the place, and 
 who willingly went with Hewson as his valet and 
 general house-workman. With the wife of the gard 
 ener coming in to cook for them during the long 
 daylight, he got on in as much comfort as he could 
 have expected, and by night he suffered no sort of 
 disturbance from the apparition. He had expected 
 to be annoyed by believers in spiritualism, and other 
 psychical inquirers, but it sufficed with them to learn 
 from him that he had come to regard his experience, 
 of which he had no more question now than ever, as 
 purely subjective. 
 
 It seemed to Hewson, in the six weeks time which 
 he spent at St. Johnswort, waiting to hear from Rosa- 
 lie (he had come already to think of her as Rosalie), 
 that all his life was subjective, it passed so like a 
 dream. He had some outward cares as to the place ; 
 he kept a horse in the stable, where St. John had 
 kept half a dozen, and he had the gardener look after 
 that as well as the shrubs and vegetables ; but all went 
 on in a suspensive and provisional sort. In the mean 
 time Rosalie s charm grew upon him ; everything that 
 she had said or looked, was hourly and daily sweeter 
 and dearer; her truth was intoxicating, beyond the 
 lures of other women, in which the quality of deceit 
 
HIS APPARITION. 99 
 
 had once fascinated him. Now, so late in his youth 
 ful life, he realized that there was no beauty but that 
 of truth, and he pledged himself a thousand times 
 that if she should say she could not live without him 
 he would henceforward live for truth alone, and not 
 for the truth merely as it was in her, but as it was in 
 everything. In those days he learned to know him 
 self, as he never had before, and to put off a certain 
 shell of worldliness that had grown upon him. In his 
 remoteness from it, New York became very distasteful 
 to him ; he thought with reluctance of going back to 
 it ; his club, which had been Lis home, now appeared 
 a joyless exile ; the life of a leisure class, which he 
 had made his ideal, looked pitifully mean and little 
 in the retrospect ; he wondered how he could have 
 valued the things that he had once thought worthy. 
 He did not know what he should replace it all with, 
 but Rosalie would know, in the event of not being 
 able to live without him. In that event there was 
 hardly any use of which he could not be capable. In 
 any other event he surprised himself by realizing 
 that in any other event still the universe had some 
 how more meaning than it once had. Somehow, he 
 felt himself an emancipated man. 
 
 He began many letters to Rosalie, and some he 
 
100 HIS APPARITION. 
 
 finished and some not, but he sent none ; and when 
 her letter came at last, he was glad that he had waited 
 for it in implicit trust of its coming, though he be 
 lieved she would have forgiven him if he had not had 
 the patience. The letter was quite what he could 
 have imagined of her. She said that she had put 
 herself thoroughly to the test, and she could not live 
 without him. But if he had found out that he could 
 live without her, then she should know that she had 
 been to blame, and would take her punishment. Ap 
 parently in her philosophy, which now seemed to him 
 so divine, without punishment there must be perdi 
 tion ; it was the penalty that redeemed ; that was the 
 token of forgiveness. 
 
 Ilewson hurried out to Colorado, where he found 
 llernshaw a stout, silent, impersonal man, whose no 
 tion of the paternal office seemed to be a ready 
 acquiescence in a daughter s choice of a husband ; 
 he appeared to think this could be best expressed 
 to Hewson in a good cigar, He perceptibly enjoyed 
 the business details of the affair, but he enjoyed des 
 patching them in the least possible time and the 
 fewest words, and then he settled down to the pleasure 
 of a superficial passivity. Hewson could not make 
 
HIS APPARITION. 
 
 101 
 
 oat that lie regarded his daughter as at all an unusual 
 girl, and from this he argued that her mother must 
 have been a very unusual woman. His only reason 
 for doubting that Eosalie must have got all her origin 
 ality from her mother was something that fell from 
 Hernshaw when they were near the end of their cigars. 
 He said irrelevantly to their talk at that point, " I 
 suppose you know Rosalie believes in that ghost of 
 yours ? " 
 
 " Was it a ghost ? I ve never been sure, myself, " 
 said Hewson. 
 
 " How do you explain it ? " asked his prospective 
 father-in-law. 
 
 " I don t explain it. I have always left it just as 
 it was. I know that it was a real experience. " 
 
 " I think I should have left it so, too, " said Hern 
 shaw. " That always gives it a chance to explain 
 itself. If such a thing had happened to me I should 
 give it all the time it wanted. " 
 
 " Well, I haven t hurried it, " Hewson suggested. 
 
 " What I mean, " and Hernshaw stepped to the 
 edge of the porch and threw the butt of his cigar into 
 the darkness, where it described a glimmering arc, " is 
 that if anything came to me that would help shore up 
 my professed faith in what most of us want to believe 
 
102 HIS APPAKITION. 
 
 in, I would take the common-law view of it. I would 
 believe it was innocent till it proved itself guilty. I 
 wouldn t try to make it out a fraud myself. " 
 
 " I m afraid that s what I ve really done, " said 
 Hewson. " But before people I ve put up a bluff of 
 despising it. " 
 
 " Oh, yes, I understand that, " said Ilernshaw. 
 " A man thinks that if he can have an experience like 
 that he must be something out of the common, and 
 if he can despise it " 
 
 " You ve hit my case exactly, " said Ilewson, and 
 the two men laughed. 
 
XV. 
 
 AFTER his marriage, which took place without need 
 less delay, Hewson returned with his wife to spend 
 their honey-moon at St. Johnswort. The honey 
 moon prolonged itself during an entire year, and in 
 this time they contrived so far to live down its repu 
 tation of being a haunted house that they were able 
 to conduct their menage on the ordinary terms. They 
 themselves never wished to lose the sense of some 
 thing supernatural in the place, and were never quite 
 able to accept the actual conditions as final. That is 
 to say, Rosalie was not, for she had taken Hewson s 
 apparition under her peculiar care, and defended it 
 against even his question. She had a feeling (it was 
 scarcely a conviction) that if he believed more 
 strenuously in the validity of his apparition as an au 
 thorized messenger from the unseen world it would 
 yet come again and declare its errand. She could 
 not accept the theory that if such a thing actually 
 
104- HIS APPARITION. 
 
 happened it could happen for nothing at all, or that 
 the reason of its occurrence could be indefinitely post 
 poned. She was impatient of that, as often as he 
 urged the possibility, and she wished him to use a 
 seriousness of mind in speaking of his apparition 
 which should form some sort of atonement to it for 
 his past levity, though since she had taken his ap 
 parition into her keeping he had scarcely hazarded 
 any suggestion concerning it; in fact it had become 
 so much her apparition that he had a fantastic reluc 
 tance from meddling with it. 
 
 " You are always requiring a great occasion for it, " 
 he said, at last. "What greater event could it have 
 foreshadowed or foreshown, than that which actually 
 came to pass ? " 
 
 " I don t understand you, Arthur, " she said, letting 
 her hand creep into his, where it trembled provision 
 ally as they sat together in the twilight. 
 
 " Why, that was the day I first saw you. " 
 
 " Now, you are laughing ! " she said, pulling her 
 hand away. 
 
 " Indeed, I m not ! I couldn t imagine anything 
 more important than the union of our lives. And if 
 that was what the apparition meant to portend it 
 could not have intimated it by a more noble and im- 
 
HIS APPARITION. 105 
 
 pressive behavior. Simply to be there, and then to 
 be gone, and leave the rest to us ! It was majestic, 
 it was delicate ! " 
 
 " Yes, it was. But it was too much, for it was out 
 of proportion. A mere earthly love-affair " 
 
 " Is it merely for earth ? " 
 
 "Oh, husband, I hope you don t think so! I 
 wanted you to say you didn t. And if you don t think 
 so, yes, I ll believe it came for that ! " 
 
 " You may be sure I don t think so." 
 
 " Then I know it will come again. " 
 
THE ANGEL OF THE LOKD. 
 
THE ANGEL OF THE LOKD. 
 
 I. 
 
 " ALL that sort of personification, " said Wanhope, 
 " is far less remarkable than the depersonification 
 which has now taken place so thoroughly that we no 
 longer think in the old terms at all. It was natural 
 that the primitive peoples should figure the passions, 
 conditions, virtues, vices, forces, qualities, in some 
 sort of corporal shape, with each a propensity or im 
 pulse of its own, but it does not, seem to me so natural 
 that the derivative peoples should cease to do so. It 
 is rational that they should do so, and I don t know 
 that any stronger proof of our intellectual advance 
 coujd be alleged than the fact that the old personifica 
 tions survive in the parlance while they are quite 
 extinct in the consciousness. We still talk of death 
 at times as if it were an embodied force of some kind, 
 and of love in the same way ; but I don t believe that 
 
110 THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 
 
 any man of the commonest common -school education 
 thinks of them so. If you try to do it yourself, you 
 are rather ashamed of the puerility, and when a pain 
 ter or a sculptor puts them in an objective shape, you 
 follow him with impatience, almost with contempt. " 
 
 " How about the poets ? " asked Minver, less with 
 the notion, perhaps, of refuting the psychologist than 
 of bringing the literary member of our little group 
 under the disgrace that had fallen upon him as an 
 artist. 
 
 " The poets, " said I, " are as extinct as the per 
 sonifications. " 
 
 " That s very handsome of you, Acton, " said the 
 artist. " But go on, Wanhope. " 
 
 " Yes, get down to business, " said Eulledge. Be 
 ing of no employ whatever, and spending his whole 
 life at the club in an extraordinary idleness, Rulledge 
 was always using the most strenuous expressions, and 
 requiring everybody to be practical. He leaned di 
 rectly forward with the difficulty that a man of his 
 girth has in such a movement, and vigorously broke 
 off the ash of his cigar against the edge of his saucer. 
 We had been dining together, and had been served 
 with coffee in the Turkish room, as it was called from 
 its cushions and hangings of Indian and Egyptian 
 
THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. Ill 
 
 stuffs. " What is the instance you ve got up your 
 sleeve ? " He smoked with great energy, and cast his 
 eyes alertly about as if to make sure that there was 
 no chance of Wanhope s physically escaping him, 
 from the corner of the divan, where he sat pretty well 
 hemmed in by the rest of us, spreading in an irregu 
 lar circle before him. 
 
 " You unscientific people are always wanting an 
 instance, as if an instance were convincing. An in 
 stance is only suggestive; a thousand instances, if 
 you please, are convincing, " said the psychologist. 
 " But I don t know that I wish to be convincing. I 
 would rather be enquiring. That is much more in 
 teresting, and, perhaps, profitable. " 
 
 " All the same, " Minver persisted, apparently in 
 behalf of Rulledge, but with an after-grudge of his 
 own, " you ll allow that you were thinking of some 
 thing in particular when you began with that 
 generalization about the lost art of personifying? " 
 
 " Oh, that is vejy curious, " said the psychologist. 
 " We talk of generalizing, but is there any such thing ? 
 Are n t we always striving from one concrete to an 
 other, and isn t what we call generalizing merely a 
 process of finding our way ? " 
 
 " I see what you mean, " said the artist, expressing 
 
112 THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 
 
 in that familiar formula the state of the man who 
 hopes to know what the other man means. 
 
 "That s what I say," Rulledge put in. "You ve 
 got something up your sleeve. What is it ? " 
 
 Wanhope struck the little bell on the table before 
 him, but, without waiting for a response, he inter 
 cepted a waiter who was passing with a coffee-pot, 
 and asked, " Oh, couldn t you give me some of that ? " 
 
 The man filled his cup for him, and after Wanhope 
 put in the sugar and lifted it to his lips, Rulledge 
 said, with his impetuous business air, " It s easy to 
 see what Wanhope does his high thinking on. " 
 
 " Yes, " the psychologist admitted, " coffee is an 
 inspiration. But you can overdo an inspiration. It 
 would be interesting to know whether there hasn t 
 been a change in the quality of thought since the use 
 of such stimulants came in whether it hasn t been 
 subtilized 
 
 " Was that what you were going to say ? " demand 
 ed Rulledge, relentlessly. " Come, we ve got no time 
 to throw away ! " 
 
 Everybody laughed. 
 
 " You haven t, anyway, " said I. 
 
 " Well, none of his own, " Minver admitted for 
 the idler. 
 
THE ANGEL, OF THE LORD. 113 
 
 " I suppose you mean I have thrown it all away. 
 Well, I don t want to throw away other peoples . 
 Go on, Wanhope. " 
 
II. 
 
 THE psychologist set his cup down and resumed 
 his cigar, which lie had to pull at pretty strongly be 
 fore it revived. " I should not be surprised, " he 
 began, " if a good deal of the fear of death had arisen, 
 and perpetuated itself in the race, from the early per 
 sonification of dissolution as an enemy of a certain 
 dreadful aspect, armed and threatening. That con 
 ception wouldn t have been found in men s minds at 
 first ; it would have been the result of later crude 
 meditation upon the fact. But it would have re 
 mained through all the imaginative ages, and the 
 notion might have been intensified in the more del 
 icate temperaments as time went on, and by the play 
 of heredity it might come down to our own day in 
 certain instances with a force scarcely impaired by 
 the lapse of incalculable time. " 
 
 " You said just now, " said Rulledge, in rueful 
 reproach, " that personification had gone out. " 
 
THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 115 
 
 "Yes, it has. I did say that, and yet I suppose 
 that though such a notion of death, say, no longer 
 survives in the consciousness, it does survive in the 
 unconsciousness, and that any vivid accident or illu 
 sory suggestion would have force to bring it to the 
 surface. " 
 
 " I wish I knew what you were driving at, " said 
 Kulledge. 
 
 " You remember Ormond, don t you ? " asked Wan- 
 hope, turning suddenly to me. 
 
 " Perfectly, " I said. " I he isn t living, is he ? " 
 
 " No ; he died two years ago. " 
 
 " I thought so, " I said, with the relief that one 
 feels in not having put a fellow-creature out of life, 
 even conditionally. 
 
 " You knew Mrs. Ormond, too, I believe, " the 
 psychologist pursued. 
 
 I owned that I used to go to the Ormonds house. 
 
 " Then you know what a type she was, I suppose, " 
 he turned to the others, " and as they re both dead 
 it s no contravention of the club etiquette against 
 talking of women, to speak of her. I can t very well 
 give the instance the sign that Rulledge is seeking 
 without speaking of her, unless I use a great deal of 
 circumlocution. " We all urged him to go on, and he 
 
116 THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 
 
 went on. " I had the facts I m going to give, from 
 Mrs: Ormond. You know that the Ormonds left New 
 York a couple of years ago ? " 
 
 He happened to look at Minver as he spoke, and 
 Minver answered : " No ; I must confess that I didn t 
 even know they had left the planet. " 
 
 Wanhope ignored his irrelevant ignorance. " They 
 went to live provisionally at a place up the Housatonic 
 road, somewhere perhaps Canaan ; but it doesn t 
 matter. Ormond had been suffering some time with 
 an obscure affection of the heart r 
 
 " Oh, come now ! " said Rulledge. " You re not go 
 ing to spring anything so pat as heart-disease on us ? " 
 
 " Acton is all ears, " said Minver, nodding toward 
 me. " He hears the weird note afar. " 
 
 The psychologist smiled. " I m afraid you re not 
 interested. I m not much interested myself in these 
 unrelated instances. " 
 
 " Oh, no ! " " Don t ! " " Do go on ! " the differ 
 ent entreaties came, and after a little time taken to 
 recover his lost equanimity, Wanhope went on: "I 
 don t know whether you knew that Ormond had rather 
 a peculiar dread of death. " We none of us could 
 affirm that we did, and again Wanhope resumed: " I 
 shouldn t say that he was a coward above other men 
 
THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 117 
 
 I believe lie was rather below the average in coward 
 ice. But the thought of death weighed upon him. 
 You find this much more commonly among the Rus 
 sians, if we are to believe their novelists, than among 
 Americans. He might have been a character out of 
 one of Tourguenief s books, the idea of death was so 
 constantly present with him. He once told me that 
 the fear of it was a part of his earliest consciousness, 
 before the time when he could have had any intellect 
 ual conception of it. It seemed to be something like 
 the projection of an alien horror into his life a 
 prenatal influence " 
 
 " Jove ! " Rulledge broke in. " I don t see how 
 the women stand it. To look forward nearly a whole 
 year to death as the possible end of all they re hoping 
 for and suffering for ! Talk of men s courage after 
 that ! I wonder were re not all marked. 
 
 " I never heard of anything of the kind in Ormond s 
 history, " said Wanhope, tolerant of the incursion. 
 
 Minver took his cigar out to ask, the more impres 
 sively, perhaps, " What do you fellows make of the 
 terror that a two months babe starts in its sleep with 
 before it can have any notion of what fear is on its 
 own hook 2 " 
 
 " We don t make anything of it, " the psychol- 
 
118 THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 
 
 ogist answered. " Perhaps the pathologists do." 
 
 " Oh, it s easy enough to say wind, " Rulledge in 
 dignantly protested. 
 
 " Too easy, I agree with you, " Wanhope consented. 
 " We cannot tell what influences reach us from our 
 environment, or what our environment really is, or 
 how much or little we mean by the word. The sense 
 of danger seems to be inborn, and possibly it is a 
 survival of our race life when it was wholly animal 
 and took care of itself through what we used to call 
 the instincts. But, as I was saying, it was not danger 
 that Ormond seemed to be afraid of, if it came short 
 of death. He was almost abnormally indifferent to 
 pain. I knew of his undergoing an operation that 
 most people would take ether for, and not winc 
 ing, because it was not supposed to involve a fatal 
 result. 
 
 " Perhaps he carried his own anodyne with him, " 
 said Minver, " like the Chinese. " 
 
 " You mean a sort of self -anaesthesia ? " Wanhope 
 asked. " That is very interesting. How far such a 
 principle, if there is one, can be carried in practice. 
 The hypnotists " 
 
 " I m afraid I didn t mean anything so serious or 
 scientific, " said the painter. 
 
THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 119 
 
 " Then don t switch "Wanhope off on a side track, " 
 Rulledge implored. " You know how hard it is to 
 keep him on the main line. He s got a mind that 
 splays all over the place if you give him the least 
 chance. Now, Wanhope, come down to business. " 
 
 Wanhope laughed amiably. " Why, there s so 
 very little of the business. I m not sure that it wasn t 
 Mrs. Ormond s attitude toward the fact that interested 
 me most. It was nothing short of devout. She was 
 a convert. She believed he really saw I suppose, " 
 he turned to me, u there s no harm in our recognizing 
 now that they didn t always get on smoothly together ? " 
 
 u Did they ever ? " I asked. 
 
 " Oh, yes oh, yes, " said the psychologist, kindly. 
 " They were very fond of each other, and often very 
 peaceful. " 
 
 " I never happened to be by, " I said. 
 
 " Used to fight like cats and dogs, " said Minver. 
 " And they didn t seem to mind people. It was very 
 swell, in a way, their indifference, and it did help to 
 take away a fellow s embarrassment. " 
 
 " That seemed to come mostly to an end that sum 
 mer, " said Wanhope, " if you could believe Mrs. 
 Ormand. " 
 
 " You probably couldn t, " the painter put in. 
 
120 THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 
 
 " At any rate she seemed to worship his memory. " 
 
 " Oh, yes ; she hadn t him there to claw. " 
 
 " Well, she was quite frank about it with me, " the 
 psychologist pursued. " She admitted that they had 
 always quarreled a good deal. She seemed to think 
 it was a token of their perfect unity. It was as if 
 they were each quarreling with themselves, she said. 
 I m not sure that there wasn t something in the notion. 
 There is no doubt but that they were tremendously in 
 love with each other, and there is something curious 
 in the bickerings of married people if they are in love. 
 It s one way of having no concealments ; it s perfect 
 confidence of a kind " 
 
 " Or unkind, " Minver suggested. 
 
 " What has all that got to do with it ? " Rulledge 
 demanded. 
 
 " Nothing directly, " Wanhope confessed, " and 
 I m not sure that it has much to do indirectly. Still, 
 it has a certain atmospheric relation. It is very re 
 markable how thoughts connect themselves with one 
 another. It s a sort of wireless telegraphy. They 
 do not touch at all ; there is apparently no manner of 
 tie between them, but they communicate 
 
 " Oh, Lord ! " Rulledge fumed. 
 
 Wanhope looked at him with a smiling concern, 
 
THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 121 
 
 such as a physician might feel in the symptoms of a 
 peculiar case. " I wonder, " he said absently, " how 
 much of our impatience with a fact delayed is a sur 
 vival of the childhood of the race, and how far it is 
 the effect of conditions in which possession is the 
 ideal?" 
 
 Rulledge pushed back his chair, and walked away 
 in dudgeon. " I m a busy man myself. When 
 you ve got anything to say you can send for me. " 
 
 Minver ran after him, as no doubt he meant some 
 one should. " Oh, come back ! He s just going to 
 begin ; " and when Rulledge, after some pouting, had 
 been pushed down into his chair again, Wanhope 
 went on, with a glance of scientific pleasure at him. 
 
III. 
 
 " THE house they had taken was rather a lonely 
 place, out of sight of neighbors, which they had got 
 cheap because it was so isolated and inconvenient, I 
 fancy. Of course Mrs. Ormond, with her exaggera 
 tion, represented it as a sort of solitude which nobody 
 but tramps of the most dangerous description ever 
 visited. As she said, she never went to sleep without 
 expecting to wake up murdered in her bed. " 
 
 " Like her, " said Minver, with a glance at me full 
 of relish for the touch of character which I would 
 feel with him. 
 
 " She said, " Wanhope went on, " that she was 
 anxious from the first for the effect upon Ormond. 
 In the stress of any danger, she gave me to under 
 stand, he always behaved very well, but out of its 
 immediate presence he was full of all sorts of gloomy 
 apprehensions, unless the surroundings were cheerful. 
 She could not imagine how he came to take the place, 
 but when she told him so " 
 
THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 123 
 
 <c I ve no doubt she told him so pretty promptly, " 
 the painter grinned. 
 
 " he explained that he h&d seen it on a brilliant 
 day in spring, when all the trees were in bloom, and 
 the bees humming in the blossoms, and the orioles 
 singing, and the outlook from the lawn down over 
 the river valley was at its best. He had fallen in love 
 with the place, that was the truth, and he was so 
 wildly in love with it all through that he could not 
 feel the defect she did in it. He used to go gaily 
 about the wide, harking old house at night, shutting 
 it up, and singing or whistling while she sat quaking 
 at the notion of their loneliness and their absolute 
 helplessness an invalid and a little woman in case 
 anything happened. She wanted him to get the man 
 who did the odd jobs about the house, to sleep there, 
 but he laughed at her, and they kept on with their 
 usual town equipment of two serving-women. She 
 could not account for his spirits, which were usually 
 so low when they were alone " 
 
 " And not fighting, " Minver suggested to me. 
 
 " and when she asked him what the matter was 
 he could not account for them, either. But he said, 
 one day, that the fear of death seemed to be lifted 
 from his soul, and that made her shudder. " 
 
124 THE ANGEL OF THE LORD 
 
 Rulledge fetched a long sigh, and Minver inter 
 preted, " Beginning to feel that it s something like 
 now. " 
 
 " He said that for the first time within his memory 
 he was. rid of that nether consciousness of mortality 
 which had haunted his whole life, and poisoned, more 
 or less, all his pleasure in. living. He had got a re 
 prieve, or a respite, and he felt like a boy another 
 kind of boy from what he had ever been. He was 
 full of all sorts o brilliant hopes and plans. He had 
 visions of success in business beyond anything he 
 had known, and talked of buying the place he had 
 taken, and getting a summer colony of friends about 
 them. He meant to cut the property up, and make 
 the right kind of people inducements. His world 
 seemed to have been emptied of all trouble as well as 
 all mortal danger. " 
 
 " Haven t you psychologists some message about 
 a condition like that ? " I asked. 
 
 " Perhaps it s only the pathologists again, " said 
 Minver. 
 
 " The alienists, rather more specifically, " said Wan- 
 hope. " They recognize it as one of the beginnings 
 of insanity -folie des grandeurs as the French call 
 the stage. " 
 
THE ANGEL OF THE LOUD. 125 
 
 "Is it necessarily that?" Rulledge demanded, with 
 a resentment which we felt so droll in him that we 
 laughed. 
 
 " I don t know that it is, " said Wanhope. " I 
 don t know why we shouldn t sometimes, in the ab 
 sence of proofs to the contrary, give such a fact the 
 chance to evince a spiritual import. Of course it had 
 no other import to poor Mrs. Ormond, and of course 
 I didn t dream of suggesting a scientific significance. " 
 
 " I should think not ! " Rulledge puffed. 
 
 Wanhope went on : "I don t think I should have 
 dared to do so to a woman in her exaltation concern 
 ing it. I could see that however his state had affected 
 her with dread or discomfort in the first place, it had 
 since come to be her supreme hope and consolation. 
 In view of what afterward happened, she regarded it 
 as the effect of a mystical intimation from another 
 world that was sacred, and could not be considered 
 like an ordinary fact without sacrilege. There was 
 something very pathetic in her absolute conviction 
 that Ormond s happiness was an emanation from the 
 source of all happiness, such as sometimes, where the 
 consciousness persists, comes to a death-bed. That 
 the dying are not afraid of dying is a fact of such 
 common, such almost invariable observation " 
 
126 THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 
 
 " You mean, " I interposed, " when the vital forces 
 are beaten so low that the natural dread of ceasing to 
 be, has no play ? It has less play, I ve noticed, in 
 age than in youth, but for the same reason that it has 
 when people are weakened by sickness. " 
 
 " Ah, " said Wanhope, " that comparative indiffer 
 ence to death in the old, to whom it is so much nearer 
 than it is to the young, is very suggestive. There 
 may be something in what you say; they may not 
 care so much because they have no longer the strength 
 the muscular strength for caring. They are too 
 tired to care as they used. There is a whole region 
 of most important inquiry in that direction " 
 
 " Did you mean to have him take that direction ? " 
 Rulledge asked, sulkily. 
 
 " He can take any direction for me, " I said. " He 
 is always delightful. " 
 
 " Ah, thank you ! " said Wanhope. 
 
 " But I confess, " I went on, " that I was wonder 
 ing whether the fact that the dying are indifferent to 
 death could be established in the case of those who 
 die in the flush of health and strength, like, for in 
 stance, people who are put to death. " 
 
 Wanhope smiled. " I think it can measurably. 
 Most murderers make a good end, as the saying used 
 
THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 127 
 
 to be, when they end on the scaffold, though they are 
 not supported by religious fervor of any kind, or the 
 exaltation of a high ideal. They go meekly and even 
 cheerfully to their death, without rebellion or even 
 objection. It is most exceptional that they make a 
 fight for their lives, as that woman did a few years 
 ago at Dannemora, and disgusted all refined people 
 with capital punishment. " 
 
 " I wish they would make a fight always, " said 
 Rulledge, with unexpected feeling. "It would do 
 more than anything to put an end to that barbarity. " 
 
 " It would be very interesting, as Wanhope says, " 
 Minver remarked. " But aren t we getting rather far 
 away ? From the Ormonds, I mean. " 
 
 " We are, rather, " said Wanhope. " Though I 
 agree that it would be interesting. I should rather 
 like to have it tried. You know Frederick Douglass 
 acted upon some such principle when his master at 
 tempted to whip him. He fought, and he had a 
 theory that if the slave had always fought there 
 would soon have been an end of whipping, and so an 
 end of slavery. But probably it will be a good while 
 before criminals are 
 
 " Educated up to the idea, " Minver proposed. 
 
 " Yes, " Wanhope absently acquiesced. " There 
 
128 THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 
 
 seems to be a resignation intimated to the parting 
 soul, whether in sickness or in health, by the mere 
 proximity of death. In Ormond s case there seems 
 to have been something more positive. His wife 
 says that in the beginning of those days he used to 
 come to her and wonder what could be the matter 
 with him. He had a joy he could not account for by 
 anything in their lives, and it made her tremble. " 
 
 " Probably it didn t. I don t think there was any 
 thing that could make Mrs. Ormond tremble, unless 
 it was the chance that Ormond would get the last 
 word, " said Minver. 
 
 No one minded him, and Wanhope continued: 
 " Of course she thought he must be going to have a 
 fit of sickness, as the people say in the country, or 
 used to say. Those expressions often survive in the 
 common parlance long after the peculiar mental and 
 moral conditions in which they originated have passed 
 away. They must once have been more accurate than 
 they are now. When one said fit of sickness one 
 must have meant something specific ; it would be in 
 teresting to know what. Women use those expressions 
 longer than men ; they seem to be inveterate in their 
 nerves; and women apparently do their thinking in 
 their nerves rather than their brains. " 
 
IV. 
 
 WANHOPE had that distant look in his eyes which 
 warned his familiars of a possible excursion, and I 
 said, in the hope of keeping him from it, "Then 
 isn t there a turn of phrase somewhat analogous to 
 that in a personification ? " 
 
 " Ah, yes a personification, " he repeated with a 
 freshness of interest, which he presently accounted 
 for. " The place they had taken was very completely 
 furnished. They got it fully equipped, even to linen 
 and silver; but what was more important to poor Or- 
 mond was the library, very rich in the English classics, 
 which appeared to go with the house. The owner 
 was a girl who married and lived abroad, and these 
 were her father s books. Mrs. Ormond said that her 
 husband had the greatest pleasure in them: their 
 print, which was good and black, and their paper, 
 which was thin and yellowish, and their binding, 
 which was tree calf in the poets, he specially liked. 
 
130 THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 
 
 They were English editions as well as English classics, 
 and she said he caressed the books, as he read them, 
 with that touch which the book-lover has } he put his 
 face into them, and inhaled their odor as if it were 
 the bouquet of wine ; he wanted her to like it, too. " 
 
 " Then she hated it, " Minver said, unrelentingly. 
 
 " Perhaps not, if there was nobody else there, " I 
 urged. 
 
 For once Wanhope was not to be tempted off on 
 another scent. " There was a good deal of old-fash 
 ioned fiction of the suspiratory and exclamatory sort, 
 like Mackenzie s, and Sterne s and his followers, full 
 of feeling, as people understood feeling a hundred 
 years ago.- But what Ormond rejoiced in most were 
 the poets, good and bad, like Gray and Collins and 
 Young, and their contemporaries, who personified 
 nearly everything from Contemplation to Indigestion, 
 through the whole range of the Vices, Virtues, Pas 
 sions, Propensities, Attributes, and Qualities, and gave 
 them each a dignified capital letter to wear. She 
 said he used to come roaring to her with the passages 
 in which these personifications flourished, and read 
 them off with mock admiration, and then shriek and 
 sputter with laughter. You know the way he had 
 when a thing pleased him, especially a thing that had 
 
THE ANGEL OF THE LOUD. 131 
 
 some relish of the quaint or rococo. As nearly as 
 she would admit, in view of his loss, he bored her 
 with these things. He was always hunting down 
 some new personification, and when he had got it, 
 adding it to the list he kept. She said he had thous 
 ands of them, but I suppose he had not so many. 
 He had enough, though, to keep him amused, and 
 she said he talked of writing something for the 
 magazines about them, but probably he never would 
 have done it. He never wrote anything, did he ? " 
 Wanhope asked of me. 
 
 " Oh, no. He was far too literary for that, " I 
 answered. " He had a reputation to lose. " 
 
 "Pretty good," said Minver, "even if Ormond is 
 dead. " 
 
 Wanhope ignored us both. " After awhile, his wife 
 said, she began to notice a certain change in his at 
 titude toward the personifications. She noticed this, 
 always expecting that fit of sickness for him ; but she 
 was not so much troubled by his returning seriousness. 
 Oh, I ought to tell you that when she first began to 
 be anxious for him she privately wrote home to their 
 family doctor, telling him how strangely happy Or 
 mond was, and asking him if he could advise anything. 
 He wrote back that if Ormond was so very happy 
 
 9 
 
132 THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 
 
 they had better not do anything to cure him ; that 
 the disease was not infectious, and was seldom fatal. " 
 
 " "What an ass ! " said Rulledge. 
 
 " Yes, I think he was, in this instance. But prob 
 ably he had been consulted a good deal by Mrs. 
 Ormond, " said Wanhope. " The change that began 
 t0-set her mind at rest about Ormond was his taking 
 the personifications more seriously. Why, he began 
 to ask, but always with a certain measure of joke in 
 it, why shouldn t there be something in the personifi 
 cations ? Why shouldn t Morn and Eve come corpore 
 ally walking up their lawn, with little or no clothes 
 on, or Despair be sitting in their woods with her hair 
 over her face, or Famine coming gauntly up to their 
 back door for a hand-out ? W"hy shouldn t they any 
 day see pop-eyed Rapture passing on the trolley, or 
 Meditation letting the car she intended to take go by 
 without stepping lively enough to get on board ? He 
 pretended that we could have the personifications 
 back again, if we were not so conventional in our con 
 ceptions of them. He wanted to know what reason 
 there was for representing Life as a very radiant and 
 bounding party, when Life usually neither shone nor 
 bounded; and why Death should be figured as an 
 enemy with a dart, when it was so often the only 
 
THE ANGEL OF THE LOUD. 133 
 
 friend a man had left, and had the habit of binding 
 up wounds rather than inflicting them. The personi 
 fications were all right, he said, but the poets and 
 painters did not know how they really looked. By 
 the way, " Wanhope broke off, " did you happen to 
 see Ilauptmann s l Hannele when it was here ? " 
 
 None of us had, and we waited rather restively for 
 the passing of the musing fit which he fell into. After 
 a while he resumed at a point whose relation to the 
 matter in hand we could trace : 
 
 " It was extremely interesting for all reasons, by its 
 absolute fearlessness and freshness in regions where 
 there has been nothing but timid convention for a 
 long time ; but what I was thinking of was the per 
 sonification of Death as it appears there. The poor 
 little dying pauper, lying in her dream at the alms- 
 house, sees the figure of Death. It is not the skeleton 
 with the dart, or the phantom with the shrouded face, 
 but a tall, beautiful young man, as beautiful as they 
 could get into the cast, at any rate, clothed in simple 
 black, and standing with his back against the mantle- 
 piece, with his hands resting on the hilt of a long, 
 two-handed sword. He is so quiet that you do not 
 see him until some time after the child has seen him. 
 When she begins to question him whether she may 
 
134 THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 
 
 not somehow get to heaven without dying, he answers 
 with a sort of sorrowful tenderness, a very sweet and 
 noble compassion, but unsparingly as to his mission. 
 It is a singular moment of pure poetry that makes the 
 heart ache, but does not crush or terrify the spirit. " 
 
 " And what has it got to do with Ormond ? " asked 
 Rulledge, but with less impatience than usual. 
 
 " Why, nothing, I m afraid, that I can make out 
 very clearly. And yet there is an obscure connection 
 with Ormond, or his vision, if it was a vision. Mrs. 
 Ormond could not be very definite about what he saw, 
 perhaps because even at the last moment he was not 
 definite himself. What she was clear about, was the 
 fact that his mood, though it became more serious, 
 by no means became sadder. It became a sort of 
 solemn joy instead of the light gaiety it had begun 
 by being. She was no sort of scientific observer, and 
 yet the keenness of her affection made her as closely 
 observant of Ormond as if she had been studying him 
 psychologically. Sometimes the light in his room 
 would wake her at night, and she would go to him, 
 and find him lying with a book faced down on his 
 breast, as if he had been reading, and his fingers in 
 terlaced under his head, and a kind of radiant peace 
 in his face. The poor thing said that when she would 
 
THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 135 
 
 ask him what the matter was, he would say, Nothing ; 
 just happiness, and when she would ask him if he 
 did not think he ought to do something, he would 
 laugh, and say perhaps it would go off of itself. But 
 it did not go off ; the unnatural buoyancy continued 
 after he became perfectly tranquil. I don t know, 
 he would say. I seem to have got to the end of my 
 troubles. I haven t a care in the world, Jenny. I 
 don t believe you could get a rise out of me if you 
 said the nastiest thing you could think of. It sounds 
 like nonsense, of course, but it seems to me that I 
 have found out the reason of things, though I don t 
 know what it is. Maybe I ve only found out that 
 there is a reason of things. That would be enough, 
 wouldn t it ? " 
 
V. 
 
 At this point Wanhope hesitated with a kind of 
 diffidence that was rather charming in him. " I don t 
 see, " he said, " just how I can keep the facts from 
 this on out of the line of facts which we are not in 
 the habit of respecting very much, or that we relegate 
 to the company of things that are not facts at all. I 
 suppose that in stating them I shall somehow make 
 myself responsible for them, but that is just what I 
 don t want to do. I don t want to do anything more 
 than give them as they were given to me. " 
 
 " You won t be able to give them half as fully, " 
 said Minver, " if Mrs. Ormond gave them to you. " 
 
 " No, " Wanhope said gravely, " and that s the pity 
 of it ; for they ought to be given as fully as possible. " 
 
 "Go ahead," Rulledge commanded, " and do the 
 best you can. " 
 
 " I m not sure, " the psychologist thoughtfully said, 
 " that I am quite satisfied to call Ormond s experiences 
 
THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 137 
 
 hallucinations. There ought to be some other word 
 that doesn t accuse his sanity in that degree. For he 
 apparently didn t show any other signs of an unsound 
 mind. " 
 
 " None that Mrs. Ormond would call so, " Minver 
 suggested. 
 
 " Well, in his case, I don t think she was such a 
 bad judge, " Wanhope returned. " She was a tolera 
 bly unbalanced person herself, but she wasn t altogether 
 disqualified for observing him, as I ve said before. 
 They had a pretty hot summer, as the summer is apt 
 to be in the Housatonic valley, but when it got along 
 into September the weather was divine, and they 
 spent nearly the whole time out of doors, driving over 
 the hills. They got an old horse from a native, and 
 they hunted out a rickety buggy from the carriage- 
 house, and they went wherever the road led. They 
 went mostly at a walk, and that suited the horse ex 
 actly, as well as Mrs. Ormond, who had no faith in 
 Ormond s driving, and wanted to go at a pace that 
 would give her a chance to jump out safely if any 
 thing happened. They put their hats in the front of 
 the buggy, and went about in their bare heads. The 
 country people got used to them, and were not scan 
 dalized by their appearance, though they were both 
 
138 THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 
 
 getting a little gray, and must have looked as if they 
 were old enough to know better. 
 
 " They were not really old, as age goes nowadays : 
 he was not more than forty-two or-three, and she was 
 still in the late thirties. In fact, they were 
 
 Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita 
 in that hour when life, and the conceit of life, is 
 strongest, and when it feels as if it might go on for 
 ever. Women are not very articulate about such 
 things, and it was probably Ormond who put their 
 feeling into words, though she recognized at once that 
 it was her feeling, and shrank from it as if it were 
 something wicked, that they would be punished for ; 
 so that one day, when he said suddenly, < Jenny, I 
 don t feel as if I could ever die, she scolded him for 
 it. Poor women ! " said Wanhope, musingly, " they 
 are not always cross when they scold. It is often the 
 expression of their anxieties, their forebodings, their 
 sex-timidities. They are always in double the danger 
 that men are, and their nerves double that danger 
 again. Who was that famous salonniere Mme. Geoff- 
 rin, was it? that Marmontel says always scolded her 
 friends when they were in trouble, and came and 
 scolded him when he was put into the Bastille ? I 
 suppose Mrs. Ormond was never so tender of Ormond 
 
THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 139 
 
 as she was when she took it out of him for suggesting 
 what she wildly felt herself, and felt she should pay 
 for feeling. " 
 
 Wanhope had the effect of appealing to Minver, 
 but the painter would not relent. " I don t know. 
 I ve seen her or heard her in very devoted mo 
 ments. " 
 
 " At any rate, " Wanhope resumed, " she says she 
 scolded him, and it did not do the least good. She 
 could not scold him out of that feeling, which was all 
 mixed up in her retrospect with the sense of the 
 weather and the season, the leaves just beginning to 
 show the autumn, the wild asters coining to crowd 
 the goldenrod, the crickets shrill in the grass, and the 
 birds silent in the trees, the smell of the rowan in the 
 meadows, and the odor of the old logs and fresh chips 
 in the woods. She was not a woman to notice such 
 things much, but he talked of them all and made her 
 notice them. His nature took hold upon what we 
 call nature, and clung fondly to the lowly and familiar 
 aspects of it. Once she said to him, trembling for 
 him, * I should think you would be afraid to take such 
 a pleasure in those things, and when he asked her 
 why, she couldn t or wouldn t tell him ; but he under 
 stood, and he said : I ve never realized before that I 
 
140 THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 
 
 was so much a part of them. Either I am going to 
 have them forever, or they are going to have me. 
 We shall not part, for we are all members of the same 
 body. If it is the body of death, we are members 
 of that. If it is the body of life, we are members of 
 that. Either I have never lived, or else I am never 
 going to die. She said : < Of course you are never 
 going to die ; a spirit can t die. But he told her he 
 didn t mean that. He was just as radiantly happy 
 when they would get home from one of their drives, 
 and sit down to their supper, which they had country- 
 fashion instead of dinner, and then when they would 
 turn into their big, lamplit parlor, and sit down for a 
 long evening with his books. Sometimes he read to 
 her as she sewed, but he read mostly to himself, and 
 he said he hadn t had such a bath of poetry since he 
 was a boy. Sometimes in the splendid nights, which 
 were so clear that you could catch the silver glint of 
 the gossamers in the thin air, he would go out and 
 walk up and down the long veranda. Once, when he 
 coaxed her out with him, he took her under the arm 
 and walked her up and down, and he said : Isn t it 
 like a ship ? The earth is like a ship, and we re sail 
 ing, sailing ! Oh, I wonder where ! Then he stopped 
 with a sob, and she was startled, and asked him what 
 
THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 141 
 
 the matter was, but he couldn t tell her. She was 
 more frightened than ever at what seemed a break in 
 his happiness. She was troubled about his reading 
 the Bible so much, especially the Old Testament; 
 but he told her he had never known before what 
 majestic literature it was. There were some turns or 
 phrases in it that peculiarly took his fancy and seemed 
 to feed it with inexhaustible suggestion. The Angel 
 of the Lord was one of these. The idea of a divine 
 messenger, embodied and commissioned to intimate 
 the creative will to the creature: it was sublime, it 
 was ineffable. He wondered that men had ever come 
 to think in any other terms of the living law that we 
 were under, and that could much less conceivably 
 operate like an insensate mechanism than it could 
 reveal itself as a constant purpose. He said he be 
 lieved that in every great moral crisis, in every ordeal 
 of conscience, a man was aware of standing in the 
 presence of something sent to try him and test him, 
 and that this something was the Angel of the Lord. 
 
 " He went off that night, saying to himself, The 
 Angel of the Lord, the Angel of the Lord ! and when 
 she lay a long time awake, waiting for him to go to 
 sleep, she heard him saying it again in his room. 
 She thought he might be dreaming, but when she 
 
142 THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 
 
 went to him, he had his lamp lighted, and was lying 
 with that rapt smile on his face which she was so 
 afraid of. She told him she was afraid and she 
 wished he would not say such things ; and that made 
 him laugh, and he put his arms round her, and laughed 
 and laughed, and said it was only a kind of swearing, 
 and she must cheer up. He let her give him some 
 trional to make him sleep, and then she went off to 
 her bed again. But when they both woke late, she 
 heard him, as he dressed, repeating fragments of verse, 
 quoting quite without order, as the poem drifted 
 through his memory. He told her at breakfast that 
 it was a poem which Longfellow had written to Low 
 ell upon the occasion of his wife s death, and he 
 wanted to get it and read it to her. She said she did 
 not see how he could let his mind run on such gloomy 
 things. But he protested he was not the least gloomy, 
 and that he supposed his recollection of the poem 
 was a continuation of his thinking about the Angel 
 of the Lord. 
 
 " While they were at table a tramp came up the 
 drive under the window, and looked in at them hun 
 grily. He was a very offensive tramp, and quite took 
 Mrs. Ormond s appetite away: but Ormond would 
 not send him round to the kitchen, as she wanted ; he 
 
THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 143 
 
 insisted upon taking him a plate and a cup of coffee 
 out on the veranda himself. When she expostulated 
 with him, he answered fantastically that the fellow 
 might be an angel of the Lord, and he asked her if 
 she remembered ParnelPs poem of The Hermit. Of 
 course she didn t, but he needn t get it, for she didn t 
 want to hear it, and if he kept making her so nervous, 
 she should be sick herself. He insisted upon telling 
 her what the poem was, and how the angel in it had 
 made himself abhorrent to the hermit by throttling 
 the babe of the good man who had housed and fed 
 them, and committing other atrocities, till the hermit 
 couldn t stand it any longer, and the angel explained 
 that he had done it all to prevent the greater harm 
 that would have come if he had not killed and stolen 
 in season. Ormond laughed at her disgust, and said 
 he was curious to see what a tramp would do that was 
 treated with real hospitality. He thought they had 
 made a mistake in not asking this tramp in to break 
 fast with them ; then they might have stood a chance 
 of being murdered in their beds to save them from 
 mischief. 
 
VI. 
 
 "MRS. Ormond really lost her patience with him, 
 and felt better than she had for a long time by scold 
 ing him in good earnest. She told him he was talking 
 very blasphemously, and when he urged that his 
 morality was directly in line with Parnell s, and Par- 
 nell was an archbishop, she was so vexed that she 
 would not go to drive with him that morning, though 
 he apologized and humbled himself in every way. 
 He pleaded that it was such a beautiful day, it must 
 be the last they were going to have ; it was getting 
 near the equinox, and this must be a weather-breeder. 
 She let him go off alone, for he would not lose the 
 drive, and she watched him out of sight from her 
 upper window with a heavy heart. As soon as he 
 was fairly gone, she wanted to go after him, and she 
 was wild all the forenoon. She could not stay indoors, 
 but kept walking up and down the piazza and looking 
 for him, and at times she went a bit up the road he 
 
THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 145 
 
 had taken, to meet him. She had got to thinking of 
 the tramp, though the man had gone directly off down 
 another road after he had his breakfast. At last she 
 heard the old creaking, rattling buggy, and as soon as 
 she saw. Ormond s bare head, and knew he was all 
 right, she ran up to her room and shut herself in. 
 But she couldn t hold out against him when he came 
 to her door with an armful of wild flowers that he had 
 gathered for her, and boughs from some young maples 
 that he had found all red in a swamp. She showed 
 herself so interested that he asked her to come with 
 him after their midday dinner and see them, and she 
 said perhaps she would, if he would promise not to 
 keep talking about the things that made her so miser 
 able. He asked her, * What things ? and she answered 
 that he knew 7 well enough, and he laughed and 
 promised. 
 
 " She didn t believe he would keep his word, but 
 he did at first, and he tried not to tease her in any 
 way. He tried to please her in the whims and fancies 
 she had about going this way or that, and when she 
 decided not to look up his young maples with him, 
 because the first autumn leaves made her melancholy, 
 he submitted. He put his arm across her shoulder as 
 they drove through the woods, and pulled her to him, 
 
146 THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 
 
 and called her * poor old thing, and accused her of 
 being morbid, lie wanted her to tell him all there 
 was in her mind, but she could not; she could only 
 cry on his arm. He asked her if it was something 
 about him that troubled her, and she could only say 
 that she hated to see people so cheerful without rea 
 son. That made him laugh, and they were very gay- 
 after she had got her cry out ; but he grew serious 
 again. Then her temper rose, and she asked, Well, 
 what is it ? and he said at first, Oh, nothing, as 
 people do when there is really something, and pres 
 ently he confessed that he was thinking about what 
 she had said of his being cheerful without reason. 
 Then, as she said, he talked so beautifully that she 
 had to keep her patience with him, though he was 
 not keeping his word to her. His talk, as far as she 
 was able to report it, didn t amount to much more 
 than this: that in a world where death was, people 
 never could be cheerful with reason unless death was 
 something altogether different from what people im 
 agined. After people came to their intellectual 
 consciousness, death was never wholly out of it, and 
 if they could be joyful with that black drop at the 
 bottom of every cup, it was proof positive that death 
 was not what it seemed. Otherwise there was no 
 
THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 147 
 
 logic in the scheme of being, but it was a cruel fraud 
 by the Creator upon the creature ; a poor practical 
 joke, with the laugh all on one side. He had got rid 
 of his fear of it in that light, which seemed to have 
 come to him before the fear left him, and he wanted 
 her to see it in the same light, and if he died before 
 her But there she stopped him and protested that 
 it would kill her if she did not die first, with no ap 
 parent sense, even when she told me, of her fatuity, 
 which must have amused poor Ormond. He said 
 what he wanted to ask was that she would believe he 
 had not been the least afraid to die, and he wished 
 her to remember this always, because she knew how 
 he always used to be afraid of dying. Then he really 
 began to talk of other things, and he led the way back 
 to the times of their courtship and their early married 
 days, and their first journeys together, and all their 
 young-people friends, and the simple-hearted pleasure 
 they used to take in society, in teas and dinners, and 
 going to the theater. He did not like to think how 
 that pleasure had dropped out of their life, and he did 
 not know why they had let it, and he was going to 
 have it again when they went to town. 
 
 " They had thought of staying a long time in the 
 country, perhaps till after Thanksgiving, for they had 
 
148 THE ANGEL OF THE LOUD. 
 
 become attached to their place ; but now they sud 
 denly agreed to go back to New York at once. She 
 told me that as soon as they agreed she felt a tre 
 mendous longing to be gone that instant, as if she 
 must go to escape from something, some calamity, 
 and she felt, looking back, that there was a prophetic 
 quality in her eagerness. " 
 
 * Oh, she was always so, " said Minver. u When 
 a thing was to be done, she wanted it done like light 
 ning, no matter what the thing was. 
 
 " Well, very likely, " Wanhope consented. " I 
 never make much account of those retroactive fore 
 bodings. At any rate, she says she wanted him to 
 turn about and drive home so that they could begin 
 packing, and when he demurred, and. began to tease, 
 as she called it, she felt as if she should scream, till 
 he turned the old horse and took the back track. She 
 was wild to get home, and kept hurrying him, and 
 wanting him to whip the horse; but the old horse 
 merely wagged his tail, and declined to go faster than 
 a walk, and this was the only thing that enabled her 
 to forgive herself afterward. " 
 
 " Why, what had she done ? " Rulledge asked. 
 
 " She would have been responsible for what hap 
 pened, according to her notion, if she had had her 
 
THE ANGEL OF THE LOKD. 149 
 
 way with the horse ; she would have felt that she had 
 driven Ormond to his doom. " 
 
 " Of course ! " said Minver. " She always found 
 a hole to creep out of. Why couldn t she go back a 
 little further, and hold herself responsible through 
 having made him turn round ? " 
 
 " Poor woman ! " said Rulledge, with a tenderness 
 that made Minver smile. " What was it that did 
 happen ? " 
 
 Wanhope examined his cup for some dregs of cof 
 fee, and then put it down with an air of resignation. 
 I offered to touch the bell, but, " No, don t, " he said. 
 "I m better without it. " And he went on: " There 
 was a lonely piece of woods that they had to drive 
 through before they struck the avenue leading to 
 their house, which was on a cheerful upland overlook 
 ing the river, and when they had got about half-way 
 through this woods, the tramp whom Ormond had fed 
 in the morning, slipped out of a thicket on the hillside 
 above them, and crossed the road in front of them, 
 and slipped out of sight among the trees on the slope 
 below. Ormond stopped the horse, and turned to 
 his wife with a strange kind of whisper. * Did you 
 see it ? he asked, and she answered yes, and bade 
 him drive on. He did so, slowly looking back round 
 
150 THE ANGEL OF THE LORD 
 
 the side of the buggy till a turn of the road hid the 
 place where the tramp had crossed their track. She 
 could not speak, she says, till they came in sight of 
 their house. Then her heart gave a great bound, and 
 she broke out on him, blaming him for having en 
 couraged the tramp to lurk about, as he must have 
 done, all day, by his foolish sentimentality in taking 
 his breakfast out to him. * He saw that you were a 
 delicate person, and now to-night he will be coming 
 round, and She says Ormond kept looking at her, 
 while she talked, as if he did not know what she was 
 saying, and all at once she glanced down at their feet, 
 and discovered that her hat was gone. 
 
 " That, she owned, made her frantic, and she blazed 
 out at him again, and accused him of having lost her 
 hat by stopping to look at that worthless fellow, and 
 then starting up the horse so suddenly that it had 
 rolled out. He usually gave her as good as she sent 
 when she let herself go in that way, and she told me 
 she would have been glad if he had done it now, but 
 he only looked at her in a kind of daze, and when he 
 understood, at last, he bade her get out and go into 
 the house they were almost at the door, and he 
 would go back and find her hat himself. Indeed, 
 you ll do nothing of the kind, she said she told him. 
 
THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 151 
 
 I shall go back with you, or you ll be hunting up 
 that precious vagabond and bringing him home to 
 supper. Ormond said, All right, with a kind of 
 dreamy passivity, and he turned the old horse again, 
 and they drove slowly back, looking for the hat in 
 the road, right and left. She had not noticed before 
 that it was getting late, and perhaps it was not so late 
 as it seemed when they got into that lonely piece of 
 woods again, and the veils of shadow began to drop 
 round them, as if they were something falling from 
 the trees, she said. They found the hat easily enough 
 at the point where it must have rolled out of the 
 buggy, and he got down and picked it up. She kept 
 scolding him, but he did not seem to hear her. lie 
 stood dangling the hat by its ribbons from his right 
 hand, while he rested his left on the dashboard, and 
 looking looking down into the wooded slope where 
 the tramp had disappeared. A cold chill went over 
 her, and she stopped her scolding. Oh, Jim, she 
 said, * do you see something ? What do you see ? 
 He flung the hat from him, and ran plunging down 
 the hillside she covered up her face when she told 
 me, and said she should always see him running till 
 the dusk among the trees hid him. She ran after 
 him, and she heard him calling, calling joyfully, Yes, 
 
152 THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 
 
 I m coming ! and she thought he was calling back to 
 her, but the rush of his feet kept getting farther, and 
 then he seemed to stop with a sound like falling. He 
 couldn t have been much ahead of her, for it was only 
 a moment till she stood on the edge of a boulder in 
 the woods, looking over, and there at the bottom 
 Ormond was lying with his face turned under him, as 
 she expressed it ; and the tramp, with a heavy stick 
 in his hand, was standing by him, stooping over him, 
 and staring at him. She began to scream, and it 
 seemed to her that she flew down from the brink of 
 the rock, and caught the tramp and clung to him, 
 while she kept screaming Murder ! The man didn t 
 try to get away ; he only said, over and over, I didn t 
 touch him, lady ; I didn t touch him. It all happened 
 simultaneously, like events in a dream, and while 
 there was nobody there but herself and the tramp, 
 and Ormond lying between them, there were some 
 people that must have heard her from the road and 
 come down to her. They were neighbor-folk that 
 knew her and Ormond, and they naturally laid hold of 
 the tramp ; but he didn t try to escape. He helped 
 them gather poor Ormond up, and he went back to 
 the house with them, and staid while one of them ran 
 for the doctor. The doctor could only tell them that 
 Ormond was dead, and that his neck must have been 
 broken by his fall over the rock. One of the neigh- 
 
THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 153 
 
 bors went to look at the place the next morning, and 
 found one of the roots of a young tree growing on the 
 rock, torn out, as if Ormond had caught his foot in 
 it; and that had probably made his fall a headlong 
 dive. The tramp knew nothing but that he heard 
 shouting and running, and got up from the foot of 
 the rock, where he was going to pass the night, when 
 something came flying through the air, and struck at 
 his feet. Then it scarcely stirred, and the next thing, 
 he said, the lady was onto him, screeching and tearing. 
 He piteously protested his innocence, which was ap 
 parent enough, at the inquest, and before, for that 
 matter. He said Ormond was about the only man 
 that ever treated him white, and Mrs. Ormond was 
 remorseful for having let him get away before she 
 could tell him that she didn t blame him, and ask him 
 to forgive her. " 
 
VII. 
 
 WANIIOPE desisted with a provisional air, and Rul 
 ledge went and got himself a sandwich from the 
 lunch-table. 
 
 " Well, upon my word ! " said Minver. " I thought 
 you had dined, Rulledge. " 
 
 Rulledge came back munching, and said to Wan- 
 hope, as he settled himself in his chair again : " Well, 
 go on. " 
 
 " Why, that s all. " 
 
 The psychologist was silent, with Rulledge staring 
 indignantly at him. 
 
 " I suppose Mrs. Ormond had her theory ? " I 
 ventured. 
 
 " Oh, yes such as it was, " said Wanhope. " It 
 was her belief her religion that Ormond had seen 
 Death, in person or personified, or the angel of it; 
 and that the sight was something beautiful, and not 
 terrible. She thought that she should see Death, too 
 
THE ANGEL OF THE LOUD. 155 
 
 in the same way, as a messenger. I don t know that 
 it was such a bad theory, " he added impartially. 
 
 " Not, " said Minver, " if you suppose that Ormond 
 was off his nut. But, in regard to the whole matter, 
 there is always a question of how much truth there 
 was in what she said about it. " 
 
 " Of course, " the psychologist admitted, " that is 
 a question which must be considered. The question 
 of testimony in such matters is the difficult thing. 
 You might often believe in supernatural occurrences 
 if it were not for the witnesses. It is very interest 
 ing, " he pursued, with his scientific smile, u to note 
 how corrupting anything supernatural or mystical is. 
 Such things seem mostly to happen either in the priv 
 ity of people who are born liars, or else they deprave 
 the spectator so, through his spiritual vanity or his 
 love of the marvelous, that you can t believe a word 
 he says. 
 
 " They are as bad as horses on human morals, " 
 said Minver. " Not that I think it ever needed the 
 coming of a ghost to invalidate any statement of Mrs. 
 Ormond s. " Rulledge rose and went away growling 
 something, partially audible, to the disadvantage of 
 Minver s wit, and the painter laughed after him : " He 
 really believes it. " 
 
156 THE ANGEL OF THE LORD. 
 
 Wanhope s mind seemed to be shifted from Mrs. 
 Ormond to her convert, whom he followed with his 
 tolerant eyes. " Nothing in all this sort of inquiry 
 is so impossible to predicate as the effect of any given 
 instance upon a given mind. It would be very inter 
 esting 
 
 " Excuse me ! " said Minver. " There s Whitley. 
 I must speak to him. " 
 
 He went away, leaving me alone with the psy 
 chologist. 
 
 "And what is your own conclusion in this in 
 stance ? " I asked. 
 
 " AVhy, I haven t formulated it yet. " 
 
THOUGH ONE EOSE FROM THE 
 DEAD. 
 
THOUGH ONE EOSE FEOM THE 
 DEAD. 
 
 I. 
 
 You are very welcome to the Alderling incident, 
 my dear Acton, if you think you can do anything 
 with it, and I will give it as circumstantially as pos 
 sible. The thing has its limitations, I should think, 
 for the fictionist, chiefly in a sort of roundedness 
 which leaves little play to the imagination. It seems 
 to me that it would be more to your purpose if it 
 were less pat, in its catastrophe, but you are a better 
 judge of all that than I am, and I will put the facts in 
 your hands, and keep my own hands off, so far as 
 any plastic use of the material is concerned. 
 
 The first I knew of the peculiar Alderling situation 
 
 was shortly after William James s "Will to Believe" 
 
 came out. I had been telling the Alderlings about it, 
 
 for they had not seen it, and I noticed that from time 
 
 159 
 
160 THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 
 
 to time they looked significantly at each other. When 
 I had got through he gave a little laugh, and she 
 said, " Oh, you may laugh ! " and then I made bold 
 to ask, " What is it ? " 
 
 " Marion can tell you, " he said, lie motioned 
 towards the coffee-pot and asked, " More ? " 1 shook 
 my head, and he said, " Come out and let us see what 
 the maritime interests have been doing for us. Pipe 
 or cigar ? " I chose cigarettes, and he brought the box 
 off the table, stopping on his way to the veranda, and 
 taking his pipe and tobacco-pouch from the hall 
 mantel. 
 
 Mrs. Alderling had got to the veranda before us, 
 and done things to the chairs and cushions, and was 
 leaning against one of the slender fluted pine columns 
 like some rich, blond caryatid just off duty, with the 
 blue of her dress and the red of her hair showing 
 deliciously against the background of white house- 
 wall. He and she were an astonishing and satisfying 
 contrast ; in the midst of your amazement you felt 
 the divine propriety of a woman like her wanting just 
 such a wiry, smoky-complexioned, black-browed, black- 
 bearded, bald-headed little man as he was. 
 
 Before he sat down where she was going to put 
 him, he stood stoopingly, and frowned at the waters 
 
THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 161 
 
 of the cove lifting from the foot of the lawn that 
 sloped to it before the house. " Three lumbermen, 
 two goodish-sized yachts, a dozen sloop-rigged boats : 
 not so bad. About the usual number that come loaf 
 ing in to spend the night. You ought to see them 
 when it threatens to breeze up. Then they re here in 
 flocks. Go on, Marion. " 
 
 He gave a soft groan of comfort as he settled in 
 his chair and began pulling at his short black pipe, 
 and she let her eyes dwell on him in a rapture that 
 curiously interested me. People in love are rarely 
 interesting that is, flesh-and-blood people. Of 
 course I know that lovers are the life of fiction, and 
 that a story of any kind can scarcely hold the reader 
 without them. The love-interest, as they call it, is 
 also supposed to be essential to the drama, and friends 
 of mine who have tried to foist their plays upon 
 managers have been overthrown by the objection that 
 the love-interest is not strong enough in what they 
 have done. Yet lovers in real life are, so far as I have 
 observed them, bores. They are confessed to be dis 
 gusting before or after marriage when they let their 
 fondness appear, but even when they try to hide it, 
 they are tiresome. Character goes down before pas 
 sion in them ; nature is reduced to propensity. Then, 
 
162 THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 
 
 how is it that the novelist manages to keep these, and 
 to give us nature and character while seeming to offer 
 nothing but propensity and passion? Perhaps he 
 does not give them. Perhaps what he does is to hyp 
 notize us so that we each of us identify ourselves 
 with the lovers, and add our own natures and charac 
 ters to the single principle that animates them. The 
 reason we like, that we endure, to read about them, 
 may be that they are ourselves rendered objective in 
 an instant of intense vitality, without the least trouble 
 or risk to us. But if we have them there before us 
 in the tiresome reality, they exclude us from their 
 pleasure in each other and stop up the perspective of 
 our happiness with their hulking personalities, bare of 
 all the iridescence of potentiality, which we could have 
 cast about them. Something of this iridescence may 
 cling to unmarried lovers, in spite of themselves, but 
 wedded bliss is a sheer offence. 
 
 I do not know why it was not an offence in the case 
 of the Alderlings, unless it was because they both, in 
 their different ways, saw the joke of the thing; At 
 any rate, I found that in their charm for each other 
 they had somehow not ceased to be amusing for me, 
 and I waited confidently for the answer she would 
 make to his whimsically abrupt bidding. But she did 
 
THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 163 
 
 not answer very promptly, even when he had added, 
 " Wanhope, here, is scenting something psychological 
 in the reason of my laughing at you, instead of ac 
 cepting the plain inference in the case. " 
 
 " What is the plain inference ? " I asked, partly to 
 fill up Mrs. Alderling s continued silence. 
 
 " When a man laughs at a woman for no apparent 
 reason it is because he is amused at her being afraid 
 of him when he is so much more afraid of her, or 
 puzzled by him when she is such an incomparable 
 riddle herself, or caring for him when he knows he is 
 not worth his salt. " 
 
 " You don t expect to put me off with that sort of 
 thing, " I said. 
 
 " Well, then, go on Marion, " Alderling repeated. 
 11 
 
II. 
 
 MRS. Alderling stood looking at him, not me, with 
 a smile hovering about the corners of her month, 
 which, when it decided not to alight anywhere, 
 scarcely left her aspect graver for its flitting. She 
 said at last, in her slow, deep-throated voice, " I 
 guess I will let you tell him. " 
 
 44 Oh, Til tell him fast enough, " said Alderling, 
 nursing his knee, and bringing it well up toward his 
 chin, between his clasped hands. " Marion has always 
 had the notion that I should live again if I believed I 
 should, and that as I don t believe I shall, I am not 
 going to. The joke of it is, and he began to splutter 
 laughter round the stem of his pipe, u she s as much 
 of an agnostic as I am. She doesn t believe she is 
 going to live again, either." 
 
 Mrs. Alderling said, 4 1 don t care for it in my 
 case. " 
 
 That struck me as rather touching, but I had no 
 right to enter uninvited into the intimacy of he 1 
 
THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 165 
 
 meaning, and I said, looking as little at her as I need, 
 " Aren t you both rather belated ? " 
 
 "You mean that protoplasm has gone out?" he 
 chuckled. 
 
 u Xot exactly, " I answered. " But you know that 
 a great many things are allowed now that were once 
 forbidden to the True Disbeliever. " 
 
 " You mean that we may trust in the promises, as 
 they used to be called, and still keep the Unfaith ? " 
 
 " Something like that. " 
 
 Alderling took his pipe out, apparently to give his 
 whole face to the pleasure of teasing his wife. 
 
 " That ll be a great comfort to Marion, " he said, 
 and he threw back his head and laughed. 
 
 She smiled faintly, vaguely, tolerantly, as if she 
 enjoyed his pleasure in teasing her. 
 
 " Where have you been," I asked, " that you don t 
 know the changed attitude in these matters ? " 
 
 " Well, here for the last three years. We tried it 
 the first winter after we came, and found it was not 
 so bad, and we simply stayed on. But I haven t real 
 ly looked into the question since I gave the conundrum 
 up twenty years ago, on what was then the best 
 authority. Marion doesn t complain. She knew what 
 I was when she married me. She was another. We 
 
166 THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 
 
 were neither of us very bigoted disbelievers. We 
 should not have burned anybody at the stake for say 
 ing that we had souls. " 
 
 Alderling put back his pipe and cackled round it, 
 taking his knee between his hands again. 
 
 " You know, " she explained, more in my direction 
 than to me, " that I had none to begin with. But 
 Alderling had. His people believed in the future 
 life. " 
 
 " That s what they said, " Alderling crowed. " And 
 Marion has always thought that if she had believed 
 that way, she could have kept me up to it; and so 
 when I died I should have lived again. It is perfectly 
 logical, though it isn t capable of a practical demon 
 stration. If Marion had come of a believing family, 
 she could have brought me back into the fold. Her 
 great mistake was in being brought up by an uncle 
 who denied that he was living here, even. The poor 
 girl could not do a thing when it came to the life 
 hereafter. " 
 
 The smile now came hovering back, and alighted 
 at a corner of Mrs. Alderling s mouth, making it look, 
 oddly enough, rather rueful. " It didn t matter about 
 me. I thought it a pity that Alderling s talent should 
 stop here. " 
 
THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 167 
 
 " Did you ever know anything like that ? " he cried. 
 " Perfectly willing to thrust me out into a cold other- 
 world, and leave me to struggle on without her, when 
 I had got used to her looking after me. Now I m 
 not so selfish as that. I shouldn t want to have Ma 
 rion living on through all eternity if I wasn t with 
 her. It would be too lonely for her. " 
 
 He looked up at her, with his dancing eyes, and 
 she put her hand down over his shoulder into the 
 hand that he lifted to meet it, in a way that would 
 have made me sick in some people. But in her the 
 action was so casual, so absent, that it did not affect 
 me disagreeably. 
 
 " Do you mean that you haven t been away since 
 you came here three years ago ? " I asked. 
 
 " We ran up to the theatre once in Boston last win 
 ter, but it bored us to the limit. " Alderling poked 
 his knife-blade into the bowl of his pipe as he spoke, 
 having freed his hand for the purpose, while Mrs. 
 Alderling leaned back against the slim column again. 
 He said gravely : "It was a great thing for Marion, 
 though. In view of the railroad accident that didn t 
 happen, she convinced herself that her sole ambition 
 was that we should die together. Then, whether we 
 found ourselves alive or not, we should be company 
 
168 THOUGH ONE HOSE FROM THE DEAD. 
 
 for each other. She s got it arranged with the thunder 
 storms, so that one bolt will do for us both, and she 
 never lets me go out on the water alone, for fear I 
 shall watch my chance, and get drowned without her. " 
 
 I did not trouble myself to make out how much of 
 this was mocking, and as there was no active partici 
 pation in the joke expected of me, I kept on the safe 
 side of laughing. " No wonder you ve been able to 
 do such a lot of pictures, " I said. " But I should 
 have thought you might have found it dull I mean 
 dull together at odd times. " 
 
 " Dull ? " he shouted. "It s stupendously dull ! 
 Especially when our country neighbors come in to 
 liven us up. * We ve got neighbors here that can 
 stay longer in half an hour than most people can in a 
 week. We get tired of each other at times, but after 
 a call from the people in the next house, we return 
 with rapture to our delusion that we are interesting. " 
 
 " And you never, " I ventured, making my jocosity 
 as ironical as possible, " wear upon each other 2 " 
 
 " Horribly ! " said Alderling, and his wife smiled 
 contentedly, behind him. " We haven t a whole set 
 of china in the house, from exchanging it across the 
 table, and I haven t made a study of Marion you 
 must have noticed how many Marions there were 
 
THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 169 
 
 that she hasn t thrown at my head. Especially the 
 Madonnas. She likes to throw the Madonnas at me. " 
 
 I ventured still farther, addressing myself to Mrs. 
 Alderling. " Does he keep it up all the time this 
 blague ? " 
 
 " Pretty much, " she answered passively, with 
 entire acquiescence in the fact if it were the fact, or 
 the joke if it were the joke. 
 
 " But I didn t see anything of yours, Mrs. Alder^ 
 ling, " I said. She had had her talent, as a girl, and 
 some people preferred it to her husband s, but there 
 was no effect of it anywhere in the house. 
 
 " The housekeeping is enough, " she answered, with 
 her tranquil smile. 
 
 There was nothing in her smile that was leading, 
 and I did not push my inquiry, especially as Alderling 
 did not seem disposed to assist. " Well, " I said, " I 
 suppose you will forgive to science my feeling that 
 your situation is most suggestive. " 
 
 " Oh, don t mind us f " said Alderling. 
 
 " I won t, thank you, " I answered. " Why, it s 
 equal to being cast away together on an uninhabited 
 island. " 
 
 " Quite, " he assented. 
 
 " There can t, " I went on, " be a corner of your 
 
170 THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 
 
 minds that you haven t mutually explored. You must 
 know each other, " I cast about for the word, and 
 added abruptly, " by heart. " 
 
 " I don t suppose he meant anything pretty ? " said 
 Aldelirng, with a look up over his shoulder at his 
 wife ; and then he said to me, " We do ; and there 
 are some very curious things I could tell you, if Ma 
 rion would ever let me get in a word. " 
 
 " Do let him, Mrs. Alderling, " I entreated, humor 
 ing his joke at her silence. 
 
 She smiled, and softly shrugged, and then sighed. 
 
 " I could make your flesh creep, " he went on, " or 
 I could if you were not a psychologist. I assure you 
 that we are quite weird at times. " 
 
 " As how " 
 
 " Oh, just knowing what the other is thinking, at a 
 given moment, and saying it. There are times when 
 Marion s thinking is such a nuisance to me, that I 
 have to yell down to her from my loft to stop it. The 
 racket it makes breaks me all up. It s a relief to have 
 her talk, and I try to make her, when she s posing, 
 just to escape the din of her thinking. Then the 
 willing ! We experimented with it, after we had first 
 noticed it, but we don t any more. It s too dead 
 easy. " 
 
THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 171 
 
 " What do you mean by the willing ? " I asked. 
 
 " Oh, just wishing one that the other was there, and 
 there he or she is. " 
 
 " Is he trying to work me, Mrs. Alderling ? " I ap 
 pealed to her, and she answered from her calm : 
 
 " It is very unaccountable. " 
 
 " Then you really mean it ! Why can t you give 
 me an illustration ? " 
 
 " Why, you know, " said Alderling more seriously 
 than he had yet spoken, "I don t believe those things, 
 if they are real, can ever be got to show off. That s 
 the reason why your Quests in the Occult are mainly 
 such rubbish, as far as the evidences are concerned. 
 If Marion and I tried to give you an illustration, as 
 you call it, the occult would snub us. But is there 
 anything so very strange about it ? The wonder is 
 that a man and wife ever fail of knowing each what 
 the other is thinking. They pervade each other s 
 minds, if they are really married, .and they are so 
 present with each other that the tacit wish should be 
 the same as a call. Marion and I are only an inten 
 sified instance of what may be done by living together. 
 There is something, though, that is rather queer, but 
 it, belongs to psychomancy rather than psychology, as 
 I understand it. " 
 
172 THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 
 
 " Ah ! " 1 said. " What is that queer something ? " 
 
 " Being visibly present when absent. It has not 
 happened often, but it has happened that I have seen 
 Marion in my loft when she was really somewhere 
 else and not when I had willed her or wished her to 
 be ther e. " 
 
 " Now, really, " I said, " I must ask you for an 
 instance. " 
 
 " You want to heap up facts, Lombroso fashion ? 
 Well, this is as good as most of Lombroso s facts, or 
 better. I went up one morning, last winter, to work 
 at a study of a Madonna from Marion, directly after 
 breakfast, and left her below in the dining-room, 
 putting away the breakfast things. She has to do 
 that occasionally, between the local helps, who are all 
 we can get in the winter. She professes to like it, 
 but you never can tell, from what a woman says ; she 
 has to do it, anyway. " It is hard to convey a notion 
 of the serene, impersonal acquiescence of Mrs. Alder- 
 ling in taking this talk of her. " I was banging away 
 at it when I knew she was behind me looking over 
 my shoulder rather more stormily than she usually 
 does ; usually, she is a dead calm. I glanced up, and 
 saw the calm succeed the storm. I kept on, and after 
 awhile I was aware of hearing her step on the stairs. " 
 
THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 173 
 
 Aider! ing stopped, and smoked definitively, as if 
 that were the end. 
 
 " Well, " I said, after waiting a while, " I don t 
 exactly get the unique value of the incident. " 
 
 " Oh, " he said, as if he had accidentally forgotten 
 the detail, " the steps were coming up ? " 
 
 " Yes ? " 
 
 " She opened the door, which she had omitted to 
 do before, and when she came in she denied having 
 been there already. She owned that she had been 
 hurrying through her work, and thinking of mine, so 
 as to make me do something, or undo something, to 
 it ; and then all at once she lost her impatience, and 
 came up at her leisure. I don t exactly like to tell 
 what she wanted. " 
 
 He began to laugh provokingly, and she said, tran 
 quilly, " I don t mind your telling Mr. Wanhope, " 
 
 " Well, then, strictly in the interest of psychomancy, 
 I will confide that she had found some traces of a 
 model that I used to paint my Madonnas from, before 
 we were married, in that picture. She had slept on 
 her suspicion, and then when she could not stand it 
 any longer, she had come up in the spirit to say that 
 she was not going to be mixed up in a Madonna with 
 any such minx. The words are mine, but the mean. 
 
174 Tlioroil OXK HOSK FROM THE DKAD. 
 
 ing was Marion s, When she found me taking the 
 minx out, sin* went quietly l*a<-k to washing lier 
 dishes, and then returned in the body to give me a 
 sitting. " 
 
M AKKAII) I M UKSroNSIISLK FOK THAT" 
 
III. 
 
 WE were silent a moment, till I asked, "Is this 
 true, Mrs. Alderling?" 
 
 " About, " she said. " I don t remember the storm, 
 exactly. " 
 
 " Well, I don t see why you bother to remain in 
 the body at all, " I remarked. 
 
 " We haven t arranged just how to leave it togeth 
 er, " said Alderling. " Marion, here, if I managed to 
 get off first, would have no means of knowing whether 
 her theory of the effect of my unbelief on my future 
 was right or not; and if she gave me the slip, she 
 would always be sorry that she had not stayed here 
 to convert me. " 
 
 " Why don t you agree that if either of you lives 
 again, he or she shall make some sign to let the other 
 know ? " I suggested. 
 
 " Well, that has been tried so often, and has it ever 
 worked? It s open to the question whether the dead 
 
176 THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD 
 
 do not fail to show up because they are forbidden to 
 communicate with the living; and you are just where 
 you were, as to the main point. No, I don t see any 
 way out of it. " 
 
 Mrs. Alderling went into the house and came out 
 with a book in her hand, and her fingers in it at two 
 places. It was that impressive collection of Christ s 
 words from the New Testament called " The Great 
 Discourse." She put the book before me, first at one 
 place and then at another, and I read, " Whosoever 
 liveth and believeth in me shall never die," and then, 
 " Nay, but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise 
 perish. " She did not say anything in showing me 
 these passages, and I found something in her action 
 touchingly childlike and elemental, as well as curiously 
 heathenish. It was as if some poor pagan had brought 
 me his fetish to test its effect upon me. " Yes, " I 
 said, " those are things that we hardly know what to 
 do with in our philosophy. They seem to be said as 
 with authority, and yet, somehow, we cannot admit 
 their validity in a philosophical inquiry as to a future 
 life. Aren t they generally taken to mean that we 
 shall be unhappy or happy hereafter, rather than that 
 we shall be or not be at all ? And what is believing ? 
 Is it the mere act of acknowledgement, or is it 
 
THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 177 
 
 something more vital, which expresses itself in con 
 duct?" 
 
 She did not try to say. In fact she did not answer 
 at all. Whatever point was in her mind she did not, 
 or could not, debate it. I perceived, in a manner, that 
 her life was so largely subliminal that if she had tried 
 she could not have met my question any more than 
 if she had not had the gift of speech at all. But, in 
 her inarticulate fashion, she had exposed to me a state 
 of mind which I was hardly withheld by the decencies 
 from exploring. " You know, " I said, " that psychol 
 ogy almost begins by rejecting the authority of these 
 sayings, and that while we no longer deny anything, 
 we cannot allow anything merely because it has been 
 strongly affirmed. Supposing that there is a life after 
 this, how can it be denied to one and bestowed upon 
 another because one has assented to a certain super 
 natural claim and another has refused to do so ? That 
 does not seem reasonable, it does not seem right. 
 Why should you base your conclusion as to that life 
 upon a promise and a menace which may not really 
 refer to it in the sense which they seem to have ? " 
 
 " Isn t it all there is ? " she asked, and Alderling 
 burst into his laugh. 
 
 " I m afraid she s got you there, Wanhope. When 
 
 THF 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
178 THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 
 
 it comes to polemics there s nothing like the passive 
 obstruction of Mrs. Alderling. Marion might never 
 have been an early Christian herself I think she s 
 an inexpugnable pagan but she would have ^one 
 round making it awfully uncomfortable for the other 
 unbelievers. " 
 
 " You know , " she said to him, and I never could 
 decide how much she was in earnest, " that I can t 
 believe till you do. I couldn t take the risk of keep 
 ing on without you. " 
 
 Alderling followed her in-doors, where she now 
 went to put the book away, with the mock addressed 
 to me, " Did you ever know such a stubborn wo- 
 
IV. 
 
 ONE conclusion from my observation of the Alder- 
 lings during the week I spent with them was that it 
 is bad for a husband and wife to be constantly and 
 unreservedly together, not because they grow tired of 
 each other, but because they grow more intensely in 
 terested in each other. Children, when they come, 
 serve the purpose of separating the parents; they 
 seem to unite them in one care, but they divide them 
 in their employments, at least in the normally consti 
 tuted family. If they are rich, and can throw the 
 care of the children upon servants, then they cannot 
 enjoy the relief from each other that children bring 
 to the mother who nurtures and teaches them, and to 
 the father who must work for them harder than be 
 fore. The Alderlings were not rich enough to have 
 been freed from the wholesome responsibilities of 
 parentage, but they were childless, and so they were 
 
 not detached from the perpetual thought of each other. 
 12 
 
180 THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 
 
 If they had only had different tastes, it might have 
 been better, but they were both artists, she not less 
 than he, though she no longer painted. When their 
 common thoughts were not centred upon each other s 
 being, they were centred on his work, which, viciously 
 enough, was the constant reproduction of her visible 
 personality. I could always see them studying each 
 other, he with an eye to her beauty, she with an eye 
 to his power. 
 
 He was every now and then saying to her, " Hold 
 on, Marion, " and staying her in some pose or move 
 ment, while he made mental note of it, and I was 
 conscious of her preying upon his inmost thoughts 
 and following him into the recesses of his reveries, 
 where it is best for a man to be alone, even if he is 
 sometimes a beast there. She was not like those 
 wives who ask their husbands, when they do not hap 
 pen to be talking, " What are you thinking about ? " 
 and I put this to her credit, till I realized that she 
 had no need to ask, for she knew already. Now and 
 then I saw him get up and shake himself restively, 
 but I am bound to say in her behalf, that her pursuit 
 of him seemed quite involuntary, and that she enjoyed 
 it no more than he did. Twenty times I was on the 
 point of asking, " Why don t you people go in for a 
 
THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 181 
 
 good long separation ? Is there nothing to call you 
 to Europe, Alderling ? Haven t you got a mother, or 
 sister, or some one that you could visit, Mrs. Alder- 
 ling ? It would do you both a world of good. " 
 
 But it happened, oddly enough, that the Alderlings 
 were as kinless as they were childless, and if he had 
 gone to Europe he would have taken her with him, 
 and prolonged their seclusion by the isolation in 
 which people necessarily live in a foreign country. 
 I found I was the only acquaintance who had visited 
 them during the years of their retirement on the coast, 
 where they had stayed, partly through his inertia, and 
 partly from his superstition that he could paint 
 better away from the ordinary associations and in 
 centives; and they ceased, before I left, to get the 
 good they might of my visit because they made me a 
 part of their intimacy, instead of making themselves 
 part of my strangeness. 
 
 After a day or two, their queer experiences began 
 to resume themselves, unabashed by my presence. 
 These were mostly such as they had already more 
 than hinted to me: the thought-transferences, and 
 the unconscious hypnotic suggestions which they 
 made to each other. There was more novelty in the 
 last than the first. If I could trust them, and they 
 
182 THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 
 
 did not seem to wish to exploit their mysteries for 
 the effect on me, they were with each other because 
 one or the other had willed it. She would say, if we 
 were sitting together without him, " I think Rupert 
 wants me ; I ll be back in a moment, " and he, if she 
 were not by, for some time, would get up with, " Ex 
 cuse me, I must go to Marion ; she s calling me. " 
 
 I had to take a great deal of this on faith ; in fact, 
 none of it was susceptible of proof; but I have not 
 been able since to experience all the skepticism which 
 usually replaces the impression left by sympathy with 
 such supposed occurrences. The thing was not quite 
 what we call uncanny; the people were so honest, 
 both of them, that the morbid character of like 
 situations was wanting. The events, if they could be 
 called so, were not invited, I was quite sure, and they 
 were varied by such diversions as we had in reach. 
 I went blueberrying with Mrs. Alderling in the morn 
 ing after she had got her breakfast dishes put away, 
 in order that we might have something for dessert at 
 our midday dinner ; and I went fishing off the old 
 stone crib with Alderling in the afternoon, so that we 
 might have cunners for supper. The farmerfolks and 
 fisherfolks seemed to know them and to be on tolerant 
 terms with them, though it was plain that they still 
 
THOUGH ONE HOSE FROM THE DEAD 183 
 
 considered them probational in their fellow-citizenship. 
 I do not think they were liked the less because they 
 did not assume to be of the local sort, but let their 
 difference stand, if it would. There was nothing 
 countrified in her dress, which was frankly conven 
 tional ; the short walking-skirt had as sharp a slant 
 in front as her dinner-gown would have had, and he 
 wore his knickerbockers it was then the now-faded 
 hour of knickerbockers with an air of going out 
 golfing in the suburbs. They stood on ceremony in 
 addressing the natives, who might have been Jim or 
 Liza to each other, but were always Mr. Donald or 
 Mrs. Moody, with the Alderlings. They said they 
 would not like being called by their first names them 
 selves, and they did not see why they should take 
 that freedom with others. Neither by nature nor by 
 nurture were they out of the ordinary in their ideals, 
 and it was by a sort of accident that they were so 
 different in their realities. She had stayed on with 
 him through the first winter in the place they had 
 taken for the summer, because she wished to be with 
 him, rather than because she wished to be there, and 
 he had stayed because he had not just found the mo 
 ment to break away, though afterwards he pretended 
 a reason for staying. They had no more voluntarily 
 
184 THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 
 
 cultivated the natural than the supernatural ; he kin 
 dled the fire for her, and she made the coffee for 
 him, not because they preferred, but because they 
 must; and they had arrived at their common ground 
 in the occult by virtue of being alone together, and 
 not by seeking the solitude for the experiment which 
 the solitude promoted. Mrs. Alderling did not talk 
 less, nor he more, when either was alone with me, 
 than when we were all together ; perhaps he was more 
 silent, and she not quite so much ; she was making 
 up for him in his absence as he was for her in her 
 presence. But they were always hospitable and 
 attentive hosts, and though under the peculiar cir 
 cumstances of Mrs. Alderling s having to do the 
 house-work I necessarily had to do a good many 
 things for myself, there were certain little graces 
 which were never wanting, from her hands : my cur 
 tains were always carefully drawn, and my coverlet 
 triangularly opened, so that I did not have to pull it 
 down myself. There was a freshly trimmed lamp on 
 the stand at my bed-head, and a book and paper- 
 cutter put there, with a decanter of whiskey and a 
 glass of water. I note these things to you, because 
 they are touches which help remove the sense of any 
 thing intentional in the occultism of the Alderlings. 
 
THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 185 
 
 I do not know whether I shall be able to impart 
 the feeling of an obscure pathos in the case of Mrs. 
 Alderling, which I certainly did not experience in 
 Alderling s. Temperamentally he was less fitted to 
 undergo the rigors of their seclusion than she was; 
 in his liking to talk, he needed an audience and a 
 variety of listening, and she, in her somewhat feline 
 calm, could not have been troubled by any such need. 
 You can be silent to yourself, but you cannot very 
 well be loquacious, without danger of having the devil 
 for a listener, if the old saying is true. Yet still, I 
 felt a keener poignancy in her sequestration. Her 
 beauty had even greater claim to regard than his 
 eloquence. She was a woman who could have com 
 manded a whole roomful with it, and no one would 
 have wanted a word from her. She could only have 
 been entirely herself in society, where, and in spite of 
 everything that can be said against it, we can each, if 
 we will, be more natural than out of it. The reason 
 that most of us are not natural in it is that we want 
 to play parts for which we are more or less unfit, and 
 Marion Alderling never wished to play a part, I was 
 sure. It would have sufficed her to be herself wher 
 ever she was, and the more people there were by, the 
 more easily she could have been herself. 
 
186 THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 
 
 I am not able to say now how much of all this is 
 observation of previous facts, and how much specula 
 tion based upon subsequent occurrences. At the best 
 I can only let it stand for characterization. In the 
 same interest I will add a fact in relation to Mrs. 
 Alderling which ought to have its weight against any 
 undue appeal I have been making in her behalf. 
 Without in the least blaming her, I will say that I 
 think that Mrs. Alderling ate too much. She must 
 have had naturally a strong appetite, which her active 
 life sharpened, and its indulgence formed a sort of 
 refuge from the pressure of the intense solitude in 
 which she lived, and which was all the more a solitude 
 because it was solitude a deux. I noticed that beyond 
 the habit of cooks she partook of the dishes she had 
 prepared, and that after Alderling and I had finished 
 dinner, and he was impatient to get at his pipe, she 
 remained prolonging her dessert. One night, when 
 he and I came in from the veranda, she was standing 
 at the sideboard, bent over a saucer of something, 
 and she made me think of a large tortoise-shell cat 
 which has got at the cream. I expected in my nerves 
 to hear her lap, and my expectation was heightened 
 by the soft, purring laugh with which she owned that 
 she was hungry, and those berries were so nice. 
 
THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 187 
 
 At the risk of giving the effect of something sensu 
 ous, even sensual, in her, I find myself insisting upon 
 this detail, which did not lessen her peculiar charm. 
 As far as the mystical quality of the situation was 
 concerned, I fancy your finding that rather heightened 
 by her innocent gourmandise. You must have 
 noticed how inextricably, for this life at least, the 
 spiritual is trammeled in the material, how personal 
 character and ancestral propensity seem to flow side 
 by side in the same individual without necessarily af 
 fecting each other. On the moral side Mrs. Alderling 
 was no more to be censured for the refuge which her 
 nerves sought from the situation in over-eating than 
 Alderling for the smoking in which he escaped from 
 the pressure they both felt from one another; and 
 she was not less fitted than lie for their joint ex 
 perience. 
 
V. 
 
 I DO not suppose it was with the notion of keeping 
 her weight down that Mrs. Alderling rowed a good 
 deal on the cove before the cottage ; but she had a 
 boat, which she managed very well, and which she 
 was out in, pretty much the whole time when she was 
 not cooking, or eating or sleeping, or roaming the 
 berry-pastures with me, or sitting to Alderling for his 
 Madonnas. He did not care for the water himself ; 
 he said he knew every inch of that cove, and was tired 
 of it ; but he rather liked his wife s going, and they 
 may both have had an unconscious relief from each 
 other in the absences which her excursions promoted. 
 She swam as well as she rowed, and often we saw her 
 going down water-proofed to the shore, where we 
 presently perceived her pulling off in her bathing- 
 dress. Well out in the cove she had the habit of 
 plunging overboard, and after a good swim, she rowed 
 back, and then, discreetly water-proofed again, she 
 
THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 189 
 
 climbed the lawn back to the house. Now and then 
 she took me out in her boat, but so far as I remember, 
 Alderling never went with her. Once I ventured to 
 ask him if he never felt anxious about her. He said 
 no, he should not have been afraid to go with her, and 
 she could take better care of herself than he could. 
 Besides, by means of their telepathy they were in 
 constant communion, and he could make her feel at 
 any sort of chance, that he did not wish her to take 
 it, and she would not. This was the only occasion 
 when he treated their peculiar psychomancy boastfully, 
 and the only occasion when I felt a distinct misgiving 
 of his sincerity. 
 
 The day before I left, Mrs. Alderling went down 
 about eleven in the morning to her boat, and rowed 
 out into the cove. She rowed far toward the other 
 shore, whither, following her with my eyes from Ald- 
 erling s window, I saw its ridge blotted out by a long 
 low cloud. It was straight and level as a wall, and 
 looked almost as dense, and I called Alderling. 
 
 " Oh, that fog won t come in before afternoon, " he 
 said. " We usually get it about four o clock. But 
 even if it does, " he added dreamily, " Marion can 
 manage. I d trust her anywhere in this cove in any 
 kind of weather. " 
 
190 THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 
 
 He went back to his work, and painted away for 
 five or six minutes. Then he asked me, still at the 
 window, " What s that fog doing now ? " 
 
 " Well, I don t know, " I answered. " I should 
 say it was making in. " 
 
 " Do you see Marion ? " 
 
 " Yes, she seems to be taking her bath. " 
 
 Again he painted a while before he asked, " Has 
 she had her dip ? " 
 
 " She s getting back into her boat. " 
 
 " All right, " said Alderling, in a tone of relief. 
 " She s good to beat any fog in these parts ashore. 
 I wish you would come and look at this a minute. " 
 
 I went, and we lost ourselves for a time in our crit 
 icism of the picture. He was harder on it than I was. 
 He allowed, "C est un bon portrait, as the French used 
 to say of a faithful landscape, though I believe now 
 the portrait can t be too good for them. I can t say 
 about landscape. But in a Madonna I feel that there 
 can be too much Marion, not for me, of course, but 
 for the ideal, which I suppose we are bound to re 
 spect. Marion is not spiritual, but I would not have 
 her less of the earth earthy, for all the angels that 
 ever spread themselves in strong level flight. 
 
 I recognized the words from " The Blessed Damo- 
 
THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 191 
 
 zel, " and I made bold to be so personal as to say, " If 
 her hair were a little redder than the color of ripe 
 corn one might almost feel that the Blessed Damozel 
 had been painted from Mrs. Alderling. It s the lin 
 gering earthiness in her that makes the Damozel so 
 divine. " 
 
 " Yes, that was a great conception. I wonder none 
 of the fellows do that kind of thing now. " 
 
 I laughed and said, " Well, so few of them have 
 had the advantage of seeing Mrs. Alderling. And 
 besides, Rosettis don t happen every day. " 
 
 " It was the period, too. I always tell her that she 
 belongs among the later eighteen sixties. But she 
 insists that she wasn t even born then. Marion is 
 tremendously single-minded. " 
 
 " She has her mind all on you. " 
 
 He looked askance at me. " You ve noticed * 
 
 " I ve noticed that your mind is all on her. " 
 
 " Not half as much ! " he protested, fervidly. " I 
 don t think it s good for her, though of course I like 
 it. That is, in a way. Sometimes it s rather too 
 He suddenly flung his brush from him, and started 
 up, with a loudly shouted, u Yes, yes ! I m coming, " 
 and hurled himself out of the garret which he used 
 for his studio, and cleared the stairs with two bounds. 
 
192 THOUGH ONE KOSE FROM THE DEAD. 
 
 By the time I reached the outer door of the cottage, 
 he was a dark blur in the white blur of the fog which 
 had swallowed up the cove, and was rising round the 
 house- walls from the grass. I heard him shouting, 
 " Marion ! " and a faint mellow answer, far out in the 
 cove, " Hello ! " and then 
 
 " Where are you?" and her answer " Here ! " 
 I heard him jump into a boat, and the thump of 
 the oars in the row-locks, and then the rapid beat of 
 the oars while he shouted, " Keep calling ! " and she 
 answerd, 
 
 " I will ! " and called " Hello ! Hello ! Hello ! " 
 I made my mental comment that this time their 
 mystical means of communication was somehow not 
 working. But after her last hello, no sound broke 
 the white silence of the fog except the throb of Al- 
 derling s oars. She was evidently resting on hers, lest 
 she should baffle his attempts to find her by trying to 
 find him. 
 
 I suppose ten minutes or so had passed, when 
 the dense air brought me the sound of low laughing 
 that was also like the sound of low sobbing, and then 
 I knew that they had met somewhere in the blind 
 space. I began to hear rowing again, but only as 
 of one boat, and suddenly out of the mist, almost 
 
THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 193 
 
 at my feet, Alderling s boat shot up on the shelving 
 beach, and his wife leaped ashore from it, and ran 
 past me up the lawn, while he pulled her boat out 
 on the gravel. She must have been trailing it from 
 the stern of his. 
 
VI. 
 
 I WAS abroad when Mrs. Alderling died, but I heard 
 that it was from a typhoid fever which she had 
 contracted from the water in their well, as was sup 
 posed. The water-supply all along that coast is 
 scanty, and that summer most of the wells were dry, 
 and quite a plague of typhoid raged among the people 
 from drinking the dregs. The fever might have gone 
 the worse with her because of her over-fed robust 
 ness ; at any rate it went badly enough. 
 
 I first heard of her death from Minver at the club, 
 and I heard with still greater astonishment that Al 
 derling was down there alone where she had died. 
 Minver said that somebody ought to go down and 
 look after the poor old fellow, but nobody seemed to 
 feel it exactly his office. Certainly I did not feel it 
 mine, and I thought it rather a hardship when a few 
 days after I found a letter from Alderling at the club 
 quite piteously beseeching me to come to him. He 
 
THOUGH ONE HOSE FROM THE DEAD. 195 
 
 had read of my arrival home, in a stray New York 
 paper, and he was firing his letter, he said, at the 
 club, with one chance in a thousand of hitting me 
 with it. Rulledge was by when I read it, and he de 
 cided, with that unsparing activity of his, where other 
 people are concerned, that I must go ; I certainly 
 could not resist such an appeal as that. He had a 
 vague impression, lie said, of something weird in the 
 situation down there, and I ought to go and pull 
 Alderling out of it ; besides, I might find my account 
 in it as a psychologist. I hesitated a day, out of 
 self-respect, or self-assertion, and then, the weather 
 coming on suddenly hot, in the beginning of Septem 
 ber, I went. 
 
 Of course I had meant to go, all along, but I was 
 not so glad when I arrived, as I might have been if 
 Alderling had given me a little warmer welcome. His 
 mood had changed since writing to me, and the 
 strongest feeling he showed at seeing me was what 
 affected me very like a cold surprise. 
 
 If I had broken in on a solitude in that place 
 before, I was now the intruder upon a desolation. 
 Alderling was living absolutely alone, except for the 
 occasional presence of a neighboring widow all the 
 middle-aged women there are widows, with dim or 
 
 13 
 
196 THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 
 
 dimmer memories of husbands lost off the Banks, or 
 elsewhere at sea who came in to get his meals and 
 make his bed, and then had instructions to leave. It 
 was in one of her prevailing absences that I arrived 
 with my bag, and I had to hammer a long time with 
 the knocker on the open door before Alderling came 
 clacking down the stairs in his slippers from the top 
 of the house, and gave me his somewhat defiant 
 greeting. I could almost have said that he did not 
 recognize me at the first bleared glance, and his 
 inability, when he realized who it was, to make me 
 feel at home, encouraged me to take the affair into 
 my own hands. 
 
 He looked frightfully altered, but perhaps it was 
 the shaggy beard that he had let grow over his poor, 
 lean muzzle, that mainly made the difference. His 
 clothes hung gauntly upon him, and he had a weak- 
 kneed stoop. His coat sleeves were tattered at the 
 wrists, and one of them showed the white lining at 
 the elbow. I simply shaddered at his shirt. 
 
 " Will you smoke ? " he asked huskily, almost at 
 the first word, and with an effect of bewilderment in 
 his hospitality that almost made me shed tears. 
 
 "Well, not just yet, Alderling, " I said. u Shall 
 I go to my old room ? " 
 
THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 197 
 
 " Go anywhere, " he answered, and he let me carry 
 my bag to the chamber where I had slept before. 
 
 It was quite as his wife would have arranged it, 
 even to the detail of a triangular portion of the bed 
 ding turned down as she used to do it for me. The 
 place was well aired and dusted, and gave me the 
 sense of being as immaculately clean and fresh as 
 Alderling was not. He sat down in a chair by the 
 window, and he remained, while I laid out my things 
 and made my brief toilet, unabashed by those in 
 cidents for which I did not feel it necessary to banish 
 him, if he liked staying. 
 
 We had supper by-and-by, a very well-cooked meal 
 of fried fresh cod and potatoes, with those belated 
 blackberries which grow so sweet when they hang 
 long on the canes into September. There was a third 
 plate laid, and I expected that when the housekeep 
 er had put the dishes on the table, she would sit 
 down with us, as the country-fashion still is, but she 
 did not reappear till she came in with the dessert 
 and coffee. Alderling ate hungrily, and much more 
 than I had remembered his doing, but perhaps I form 
 erly had the impression of Mrs. Alderling s fine 
 appetite so strongly in mind that I had failed to note 
 his. Certainly, however, there was a difference in 
 
198 THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 
 
 one sort which I could not be mistaken in, and that 
 was in his not talking. Her mantle of silence had 
 fallen upon him, and whereas he used hardly to give 
 me a chance in the conversation, he now let me do all 
 of it. He scarcely answered my questions, and he 
 asked none of his own ; but I saw that he liked being 
 talked to, and I did my best, shying off from his 
 sorrow, as people foolishly do, and speaking banalities 
 about my trip to Europe, and the Psychological Con 
 gress in Geneva, and the fellows at the club, and 
 heaven knows what rot else. 
 
 He listened, but I do not know whether he heard 
 much of my clack, and I got very tired of it myself 
 at last. When I had finished my blackberries, he 
 asked mechanically, in an echo of my former visit, 
 with a repetition of his gesture towards the coffee-pot, 
 " More 3" I shook my head, and then he led the way 
 out to the veranda, stopping to get his pipe and 
 tobacco from the mantel on the way. But when we 
 sat down in the early falling September twilight out 
 side, he did not light his pipe, letting me smoke my 
 cigarette alone. 
 
 " Are you off your tobacco ? " I asked. 
 
 " I don t smoke, " he answered, but he did not ex 
 plain why, and I did not feel authorized to ask. 
 
THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 199 
 
 The talk went on as lopsidedly as before, and I 
 began to get sleepy. I made bold to yawn, but Ald- 
 erling did not mind that, and then I made bold to say 
 that I thought I would go to bed. He followed me 
 indoors, saying that he would go to bed, too. The 
 hall was lighted from a hanging-lamp and two clear- 
 burning hand-lamps which the widow had put for us 
 on a small table. She had evidently gone home, and 
 left us to ourselves. He took one lamp and I the 
 other, and he started up stairs before me. If he were 
 not coming down again, he meant to let the hanging- 
 lamp burn, and I had nothing to say about that ; but 
 I suggested, concerning the wide-open door behind 
 me, "Shall I close the door, Alderling?" and he an 
 swered, without looking round, " I don t shut it. " 
 
 He led the way into my room, aud he sat down as 
 when I had come, and absently watched my processes 
 of getting into bed. There was something droll, and 
 yet miserable, in his behavior. At first, I thought 
 he might be staying merely for the comfort of a 
 human presence, and again, I thought he might be 
 afraid, for I felt a little creepy myself, for no as 
 signable reason, except that Absence, which he must 
 have been incomparably more sensible of than I. 
 From certain ineffectual movements that he made, and 
 
200 THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 
 
 from certain preliminary noises in his throat, which 
 ended in nothing, I decided that he wished to say 
 something to me, tell me something, and could not. 
 But I was selfishly sleepy, and it seemed to me that 
 anything he had on his mind would keep there till 
 morning, at least, and that if he got it off on mine 
 now, it might give me a night of wakeful speculation. 
 So when I got into bed and pulled the sheet up under 
 rny chin, I said, " Well, I don t want to turn you out, 
 old fellow. " 
 
 He stared, and answered, " Oh ! " and went without 
 other words, carrying his lamp with him and moving 
 with a weak-kneed shuffle, like a very old man. 
 
 He was going to leave the door open behind him, 
 but I called out, " I wish you d shut me in, Alder- 
 ling, " and after a hesitation, he came back and closed 
 the door. 
 
VII. 
 
 WE breakfasted as silently on his part as we had 
 supped, but when we had finished, and I was wonder 
 ing what he was going to let me do with myself, and 
 on the whole what the deuce I Iiad come for, he said, 
 in the longest speech I had yet had from him, 
 " Wouldn t you like to come up and see what I ve 
 been doing? " 
 
 I said I should like it immensely, and he led the 
 way up stairs, as far as his attic studio. The door of 
 that, like the other doors in the house, stood open, 
 and I got the emotion which the interior gave me, full 
 force, at the first glance. The place was so startlingly 
 alive with that dead woman on a score of canvases 
 in the character in which he had always painted her, 
 that I could scarcely keep from calling out; but I 
 went about, pretending to examine the several Ma 
 donnas, and speaking rubbish about them, while he 
 stood stoopingly in the midst of them like the little 
 withered old man he looked. When I had emptied 
 
202 THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 
 
 myself of my chaff, I perceived that the time had 
 come. 
 
 I glanced about for a seat, and was going to take 
 that in which Mrs. Alderling used to pose for him, 
 but he called out with sudden sharpness, " Not that ! " 
 and without appearing to notice, I found a box which 
 I inverted, and sat down on. 
 
 " Tell me about your wife, Alderling, " I said, and 
 he answered with a sort of scream, " I wanted you to 
 ask me ! Why didn t you ask me before ? What 
 did you suppose I got you here for ? " 
 
 With that he shrank down, a miserable heap, in 
 his own chair, and bowed his hapless head and cried. 
 It was more affecting than any notion I can give you 
 of it, and I could only wait patiently for his grief to 
 wash itself out in one of those paroxysms which come 
 to bereavement and leave it somehow a little comfort 
 ed when they pass. 
 
 "I was waiting, for the stupid reasons you will 
 imagine, to let you speak first, " I said, " but here in 
 her presence I couldn t hold in any longer. " 
 
 He asked with strange eagerness, " You noticed 
 that?" 
 
 I chose to feign that he meant in the pictures. 
 " Over and over again, " I answered. 
 
THOUGH ONE HOSE FROM THE DEAD. 203 
 
 He would not have my feint. " I don t mean in 
 these wretched caricatures ! " 
 
 " Well ? " I assented provisionally. 
 
 " I mean her very self, listening, looking, living 
 waiting ! " 
 
 Whether I had insanity or sorrow to deal with, I 
 could not gainsay the unhappy man, and I only said 
 what I really felt : " Yes, the place seems strangely 
 full of her. I wish you would tell me about her. " 
 
 He asked, with a certain slyness, " Have you heard 
 anything about her already? At the club? From 
 that fool woman in the kitchen ? " 
 
 " For heaven s sake, no, Alderling ! " 
 
 " Or about me ? " 
 
 " Nothing whatever ! " 
 
 He seemed relieved of whatever suspicion he felt, 
 but he said finally, and with an air of precaution, " I 
 should like to know just how much you mean by the 
 place seeming full of her. " 
 
 " Oh, I suppose the association of her personality 
 with the whole house, and especially this room. I 
 didn t mean anything preternatural, I believe. " 
 
 " Then you don t believe in a life after death ?" he 
 demanded with a kind of defiance. 
 
 I thought this rather droll, seeing what his own 
 
204 THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 
 
 position had been, but that was not the moment for 
 the expression of my amusement. " The tendency is 
 to a greater tolerance of the notion, " I said. " Men 
 like James and Royce, among the psychologists, and 
 Shaler, among the scientists, scarcely leave us at 
 peace in our doubts, any more, much less our denials. " 
 
 He said, as if he had forgotten the question : " They 
 called it a very light case, and they thought she was 
 getting well. In fact, she did get well, and then 
 there was a relapse. They laid it to her eating some 
 fruit which they allowed her. " 
 
 Alderling spoke with a kind of bitter patience, but 
 in my own mind I was not able to put all the blame 
 on the doctors. Neither did I blame that innocently 
 earthy creature, who was of no more harm in her 
 strong appetite than any other creature which gluts 
 its craving as simply as it feels it. The sense of her 
 presence was deepened by the fact of those childlike 
 self-indulgences which Alderling s words recalled to 
 me. I made no comment, however, and he asked 
 gloomily, as if with a return of his suspicion, " And 
 you haven t heard of anything happening afterward ? " 
 
 " I don t know what you refer to, " I told him, 
 " but I can safely say I haven t, for I haven t heard 
 anything at all. " 
 
THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 205 
 
 " They contended that it didn t happen, " he re 
 sumed. " She died, they said, and- by all the tests 
 she had been dead two whole days. She died with 
 her hand in mine. I was not trying to hold her back ; 
 she had a kind of majestic preoccupation in her going, 
 so that I would not have dared to detain her if I 
 could. You ve seen them go, and how they seem to 
 draw those last, long, deep breaths, as if they had no 
 thought in the world but of the work of getting out 
 of it. When her breathing stopped I expected it to 
 go on, but it did not go on, and that was all. Noth 
 ing startling, nothing dramatic, just simple, natural, 
 like her! I gave her hand back, I put it on her 
 breast myself, and crossed the other on it. She looked 
 as if she were sleeping, with that faint color hovering 
 in her face, which was not wasted, but I did not make- 
 believe about it; I accepted the fact of her death. 
 In your Quests of the Occult, " Alderling broke off, 
 with a kind of superiority that was of almost the 
 quality of contempt, " I believe you don t allow your 
 self to be daunted by a diametrical difference of 
 opinion among the witnesses of an occurrence, as to 
 its nature, or as to its reality, even ? " 
 
 " Not exactly that, " I said. " I think I argued 
 that the passive negation of one witness ought not to 
 
206 THOUGH ONE HOSE FROM THE DEAD 
 
 invalidate the testimony of another as to his ex 
 perience. One might hear and see things, and strongly 
 affirm them, and another, absorbed in something else, 
 or in a mere suspense of the observant faculties, might 
 quite as honestly declare that so far as his own 
 knowledge was concerned, nothing of the kind hap 
 pened. I held that in such a case, counter-testimony 
 should not be allowed to invalidate the testimony for 
 the fact. " 
 
 " Yes, that is what I meant, " said Alderling. " You 
 say it more clearly in the book, though. " 
 
 "Oh, of course." 
 
VIII. 
 
 He began again, more remotely from the affair in 
 hand than he had left off, as if he wanted to give 
 himself room for parley with my possible incredulity. 
 " You know how it was with Marion about my not 
 believing that I should live again. Her notion was a 
 sort of joke between us, especially when others were 
 by, but it was a serious thing with her, in her heart. 
 Perhaps it had originally come to her as a mere fancy, 
 and from entertaining it playfully, she found herself 
 with a mental inmate that finally dispossessed her 
 judgment. You remember how literally she brought 
 those Scripture texts to bear on it?" 
 
 " Yes. May I say that it was very affecting ? " 
 " Affecting 1 " Alderling repeated in a tone of amaze 
 at the inadequacy of my .epithet. " She was always 
 finding things that bore upon the point. After awhile 
 she got to concealing them, as if she thought they 
 annoyed me. They never did ; they amused me ; and 
 
208 THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 
 
 when I saw that she had something of the sort on her 
 mind, I would say, * Well, out with it, Marion ! 
 She would always begin, Well, you may laugh ! 
 and as he repeated her words Alderling did laugh, 
 forlornly, and as I must say, rather bloodcurdlingiy. 
 
 I could not prompt him to go on, but he presently 
 did so himself, desolately enough. " I suppose, if I 
 was in her mind at all in that supreme moment, when 
 she seemed to be leaving this life behind with such a 
 solemn effect of rating it at nothing, it may have been 
 a pang to her that I was not following her into the 
 dark, with any ray of hope for either of us. She 
 could not have returned from it with the expectation 
 of convincing me, for I used to tell her that if one 
 came back from the dead, I should merely know that 
 he had been mistaken about being dead, and was giv 
 ing me a dream from his trance. She once asked me 
 if I thought Lazarus was not really dead, with a 
 curious childlike interest in the miracle, and she was 
 disheartened when I reminded her that Lazarus had 
 not testified of any life hereafter, and it did not mat 
 ter whether he had been really dead or not when he 
 was resuscitated, as far as that was concerned. Last 
 year, we read the Bible a good deal together here, and 
 to tease her I pretended to be convinced of the con- 
 
THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD 209 
 
 trary by the very passages that persuaded her. As 
 she told you, she did not care for herself. You 
 remember that ? " 
 
 " Distinctly, " I said. 
 
 " It was always so. She never cared. I was per 
 fectly aware that if she could have assured life 
 hereafter to me, she would have given her life here to 
 do it. You know how some women, when they are 
 married, absolutely give themselves up, try to lose 
 themselves in the behoof of their husbands 1 I don t 
 say it rightly ; there are no words that will express 
 the utterness of their abdication. " 
 
 " I know what you mean, " I said, " and it was one 
 of the facts which most interested me in Mrs. Al- 
 derling. " 
 
 " Because I wasn t worthy of it ? No man is ! " 
 
 " It wasn t a question of that in my mind ; I don t 
 believe that occurred to me. It was the Ding an sick 
 that interested me, or as it related itself to her, and 
 not the least as it related itself to you. Such a 
 woman s being is a cycle of self-sacrifice, so perfect, 
 so essential, from birth to death, as to exclude the 
 notion of volition. She is what she does. Of course 
 she has to put her sacrifice into words from time to 
 time, but its true language is acts, and the acts them- 
 
210 THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 
 
 selves only clumsily express it. There is a kind of 
 tyranny in it for the man, of course. It requires 
 self-sacrifice to be sacrificed to, and I don t suppose a 
 woman has any particular merit in what is so purely 
 natural. It appears pathetic when it is met with in 
 gratitude or rejection, but when it has its way it is no 
 more deserving our reverence than eating or sleeping. 
 It astonishes men because they are as naturally 
 incapable of it as women are capable of it. " 
 
 I was mounted and was riding on, forgetful of Al- 
 derling, and what he had to tell me, if he had 
 anything, but he recalled me to myself by having 
 apparently forgotten me, for when I paused, he took 
 up his affair at a quite different point, and as though 
 that were the question in hand. 
 
 " That gift, or knack, or trick, or whatever it was, 
 of one compelling the presence of the other by think 
 ing or willing it, was as much mine as hers, and she 
 tried sometimes to get me to say that I would use it 
 with her if she died before I did ; and if she were 
 where the conditions were opposed to her coming to 
 me, my will would help her to overcome the hinder- 
 ance ; our united wills would form a current of volition 
 that she could travel back on against all obstacles. I 
 don t know whether I make myself clear ? " he appealed. 
 
THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 211 
 
 " Yes, perfectly, " I said. " It is very curious. " 
 He said in a kind of muse, " I don t know just 
 where I was. " Then he began again, " Oh, yes ! It 
 was at the ceremony down there in the library. 
 Some of the country people came in ; I suppose they 
 thought they ought, and I suppose they wanted to ; 
 it didn t matter to me. I had sent for Doctor Norrey, 
 as soon as the relapse came, and he w T as there with 
 me. Of course there was the minister, conducting 
 the services. He made a prayer full of helpless rep 
 etitions, which I helplessly noticed, and some 
 scrambling remarks, mostly misdirected at me, affirm 
 ing and reaffirming that the sister they had lost was 
 only gone before, and that she was now in a happier 
 world. 
 
 " The singing and the praying and the preaching 
 came to an end, and then there was that soul-sicken 
 ing hush, that exanimate silence, of which the noise 
 of rustling clothes and scraping feet formed a part, 
 as the people rose in the hall, where chairs had been 
 put for them, leaving me and Norrey alone with 
 Marion. Every fibre of my frame recognized the 
 moment of parting, and protested. A tremendous 
 wave of will swept through me and from me, a resist 
 less demand for her presence, and it had power upon 
 u 
 
212 THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 
 
 her. I heard her speak, and say, as distinctly as I 
 repeat the words, I will come for you ! and the 
 youth and the beauty that had been growing more 
 and more wonderful in her face, ever since she died, 
 shone like a kind of light from it. I answered her, 
 I am ready now ! 7 and then Norrey scuffled to his 
 feet, with a conventional face of sympathy, and said, 
 No hurry, my dear Alderling, and I knew he had 
 not heard or seen anything, as well as I did afterwards 
 when I questioned him. lie thought I was giving 
 them notice that they could take her away. What 
 do you think?" 
 
 " How what do I think ? " I asked. 
 
 " Do you think that it happened ? " 
 
 There was something in Alderling s tone and man 
 ner that made me, instead of answering directly that 
 I did not, temporize and ask, " Why ? " 
 
 " Because because, " and Alderling caught his 
 breath, like a child that is trying to keep itself from 
 crying, " because / don t. " He broke into a sobbing 
 that seemed to wrench and tear his poor little body, 
 arid if I had thought of anything to say, I could not 
 have said it to his headlong grief with any hope of 
 assuaging it. "I am satisfied now, " he said, at last, 
 wiping his wet face, and striving for some composure 
 
THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD 213 
 
 of its trembling features, " that it was all a delusion, 
 the effect of my exaltation, of my momentary aberra 
 tion, perhaps. Don t be afraid of saying what you 
 really think, " he added scornfully, " with the notion 
 of sparing me. You couldn t doubt it, or deny it, 
 more completely than I do. " 
 
 I confess this unexpected turn struck me dumb. 
 I did not try to say anything, and Alderling went on. 
 
 " I don t deny that she is living, but I can t believe 
 that I shall ever live to see her again, or if you prefer, 
 die to see her. There is the play of the poor animal 
 instinct, or the mechanical persistence of expectation 
 in me, so that I can t shut the doors without the sense 
 of shutting he,r out, can t put out the lights without 
 feeling that I am leaving her in the dark. But I 
 know it is all foolishness, as well as you do, all crazi- 
 ness. If she is alive it is because she believed she 
 should live, and I shall perish because I didn t believe. 
 I should like to believe, now, if only to see her again, 
 but it is too late. If you disuse any member of your 
 body, or any faculty of your mind, it withers away 
 and if you deny your soul your soul ceases to be. " 
 
 I found myself saying, " That is very interesting, " 
 from a certain force of habit, which you have noted 
 in me, when confronted with a novel instance of any 
 
214 THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 
 
 kind. " But, " I suggested, " why not act upon the 
 reverse of that principle, and create the fact by affirm 
 ation which you think your denial destroys ? " 
 
 " Because, " he repeated wearily, " it is too late. 
 You might as well ask the fakir who has held his arm 
 upright for twenty years, till it has stiffened there, to 
 restore the dry stock by exercise. It it is too late, I 
 tell you. " 
 
 " But, look here, Alderling, " I pursued, beginning 
 to taste the joy of argument. " You say that your 
 will had such power upon her after you knew her to 
 be dead that you made her speak to you ? " 
 
 " No, I don t say that now, " he returned. " I 
 know now that it was a delusion. " 
 
 "But if you once had that power of summoning 
 her to you, by strongly wishing for her presence, 
 when you were both living here, why doesn t it stand 
 to reason that you could do it still, if she is living 
 there and you are living here ? " 
 
 " I never had any such power, " he replied, with 
 the calm of absolute tragedy. " That was a delusion 
 too. I leave the doors open for her, night and day, 
 because I must, but if she came I should know it was 
 not she. " 
 
IX. 
 
 OF course you know your own business, my dear 
 Acton, but if you think of using the story of the Al- 
 derlings and there is no reason why you should not, 
 for they are both dead, without kith or kin surviving, 
 so far as I know, unless he has some relatives in 
 Germany, who would never penetrate the disguise you 
 could give the case it seems to me that here is your 
 true climax. But I necessarily leave the matter to 
 you, for I shall not touch it at any point where we 
 could come into competition. In fact, I doubt if I 
 ever touch it at all, for though all psychology is in a 
 manner dealing with the occult, still I think I have 
 done my duty by that side of it, as the occult is 
 usually understood ; and I am shy of its grosser in 
 stances, as things that are apt to bring one s scientific 
 poise into question. However, you shall be the judge 
 of what is best for you to do, when you have the 
 whole story, and I will give it you without more ado, 
 
216 THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 
 
 merely premising that I have a sort of shame for the 
 aptness of the catastrophe. I shall respect you more 
 if I hear that you agree with me as to the true climax 
 of the tragedy, and have the heroism to reject the 
 final event. 
 
 I stayed with Alderling nearly a week, and I will 
 own that I bored myself. In fact, I am not sure but 
 we bored each other. At any rate, when I told him, 
 the night before I intended going, that I meant to 
 leave him in the morning, he seemed resigned, or in 
 different, or perhaps merely inattentive. From time 
 to time we had recurred to the matter of his ex 
 perience, or his delusion, but with apparently increas 
 ing impatience on his part, and certainly decreasing 
 interest on mine ; so that at last I think he was willing 
 to have me go. But in the morning he seemed re 
 luctant, and pleaded with me to stay a few days 
 longer with him. I alleged engagements, more or less 
 unreal, for I was never on such terms with Alderling 
 that I felt I need make any special sacrifice to him. 
 He gave way, suspiciously, rather, and when I came 
 down from my room after having put the last touches 
 to my packing, I found him on the veranda looking 
 out to seaward, where a heavy fog-bank hung. 
 
THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 217 
 
 You will sense here the sort of patness which I feel 
 cheapens the catastrophe ; and yet, as I consider it, 
 again, the fact is not without its curious importance, 
 and its bearing upon what went before. I do not 
 know but it gives the whole affair a relief which it 
 would not otherwise have. 
 
 He was to have driven me to the station, some 
 miles away, before noon, and I supposed we should 
 sit down together, and try to have some sort of talk 
 before I went. But Alderling appeared to have for 
 gotten about my going, and after a while, took himself 
 off to his studio, and left me alone to watch the in 
 roads of the fog. It came on over the harbor rapidly, 
 as on that morning when Mrs. Alderling had been so 
 nearly lost in it, and presently the masts and shrouds 
 of the shipping at anchor were sticking up out of it 
 as if they were sunk into a body as dense as the sea 
 under them. 
 
 I amused myself watching it blot out one detail 
 of the prospect after another, while the fog-horn lowed 
 through it, and the bell-buoy, far out beyond the 
 light-house ledge, tolled mournfully. The milk-white 
 mass moved landward, and soon the air was blind 
 with the mist which hid the grass twenty yards away. 
 There was an awf ulness in the silence, which nothing 
 
218 THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 
 
 broke but the lowing of the horn, and the tolling of 
 the bell, except when now and then the voice of a 
 sailor came through it, like that of some drowned 
 man sending up his hail from the bottom of the bay. 
 
 Suddenly I heard a joyful shout from the attic 
 overhead : 
 
 " I am .coming ! I am coming ! " 
 
 It was Alderling calling out through his window, 
 and then a cry came from over the water, which 
 seemed to answer him, but which there is no rea 
 son in the world to believe was not a girlish shout 
 from one of the yachts, swallowed up in the fog. 
 
 His lunging descent of the successive stairways fol 
 lowed, and he burst through the doorway beside me, 
 and without heeding me, ran bareheaded down the 
 sloping lawn. 
 
 I followed, with what notion of help or hinderance 
 I should not find it easy to say, but before I reached 
 the water s edge in fact I never did reach it, and 
 had some difficulty making my way back to the 
 house, I heard the rapid throb of the oars in the 
 row-locks as he pulled through the white opacity. 
 
 You know the rest, for it was the common proper 
 ty of our enterprising press at the time, when the 
 incident was fully reported, with my ineffectual efforts 
 
THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD. 219 
 
 to be satisfactorily interviewed as to the nothing 
 I knew. 
 
 The oarless boat was found floating far out to sea 
 after the fog lifted. It was useless to look for Ald- 
 erling s body, and I do not know that any search 
 was made for it. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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