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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.”

“They contended that it didn’t happen,” he resumed. “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. Nothing 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 yourself 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 invalidate the testimony of another as to his experience. 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 happened. 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!” 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 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 bloodcurdlingly.