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The moment had come at last. I knew at once what he meant, and so did Mrs. Maradick. A wave of color flowed and ebbed in her thin cheeks, and I felt her body quiver when I moved from the window and put my arms on her shoulders. I was aware again, as I had been aware that evening in Doctor Maradick’s study, of a current of thought that beat from the air around into my brain. Though it cost me my career as a nurse and my reputation for sanity, I knew that I must obey that invisible warning.

“You are going to take me to an asylum,” said Mrs. Maradick.

He made some foolish denial or evasion; but before he had finished I turned from Mrs. Maradick and faced him impulsively. In a nurse this was flagrant rebellion,
and I realized that the act wrecked my professional future. Yet I did not care — I did not hesitate. Something stronger than I was driving me on.

“Doctor Brandon,” I said, “I beg you — I implore you to wait until to-morrow. There are things I must tell you.”

A queer look came into his face, and I understood, even in my excitement, that he was mentally deciding in which group he should place me — to which class of morbid manifestations I must belong.

“Very well, very well, we will hear everything,” he replied soothingly; but I saw him glance at Miss Peterson, and she went over to the wardrobe for Mrs. Maradick’s fur coat and hat.

Suddenly, without warning, Mrs. Maradick threw the shawls away from her, and stood up.”If you send me away,” she said, “I shall never come back. I shall never live to come back.”

The gray of twilight was just beginning, and while she stood there, in the dusk of the room, her face shone out as pale and flower-like as the daffodils on the window-sill.”I cannot go away!” she cried in a sharper voice.”I cannot go away from my child!”

I saw her face clearly; I heard her voice; and then — the horror of the scene sweeps back over me! — I saw the door slowly open and the little girl run across the room to her mother. I saw her lift her little arms, and I saw the mother stoop and gather her to her bosom. So closely locked were they in that passionate embrace that their forms seemed to mingle in the gloom that enveloped them.

“After this can you doubt?” I threw out the words almost savagely — and then, when I turned from the mother and child to Doctor Brandon and Miss Peterson, I knew breathlessly — oh, there was a shock in the discovery! — that they were blind to the child. Their blank faces revealed the consternation of ignorance, not of conviction. They had seen nothing except the vacant arms of the mother and the swift, erratic gesture with which she stooped to embrace some phantasmal presence. Only my vision — and I have asked myself since if the power of sympathy enabled me to penetrate the web of material fact and see the spiritual form of the child — only my vision was not blinded by the clay through which I looked.

“After this can you doubt?” Doctor Brandon had flung my words back to me. Was it his fault, poor man, if life had granted him only the eyes of flesh? Was it his fault if he could see only half of the thing there before him?

But they couldn’t see, and since they couldn’t see I realized that it was useless to tell them. Within an hour they took Mrs. Maradick to the asylum; and she went quietly, though when the time came for parting from me she showed some faint trace of feeling. I remember that at the last, while we stood on the pavement, she lifted her black veil, which she wore for the child, and said: “Stay with her, Miss Randolph, as long as you can. I shall never come back.”