"Not a bit of it," replied the doctor, "I heard a few days later that Selim, in his jail, wove little baskets, or played for hours at a time with a chaplet of glass balls, and that he would smilingly beg a piastre of European visitors, who were surprised by the caressing softness of his eyes. Moslem justice is slow. He was hanged six months later. No one, not even he himself, was greatly concerned about it. I was in Europe at the time."
"And since then he has never reappeared?"
"Never."
Nanteuil looked at him, disappointed.
"I thought he had come when he was dead. But since he was in prison you certainly could not have seen him in your house. You only thought you saw him."
The physician, understanding what was in Félicie's mind, quickly replied:
"My dear little Nanteuil, believe what I tell you. The phantoms of the dead have no more reality than the phantoms of the living."
Without attending to what he was saying, she asked him if it was really because he suffered from his liver that he had a vision. He replied that he believed that the bad state of his digestive organs, general fatigue, and a tendency to congestion, had all predisposed him to behold an apparition.
"There was; I believe," he added, "a more immediate cause. Stretched out on my divan, my head was very low. I raised it to light a cigarette, and let it fall back immediately. This attitude is particularly favourable to hallucinations. It is sometimes enough to lie down with one's head thrown back to see and to hear imaginary shapes and sounds. That is why I advise you, my child, to sleep with a bolster and a fat pillow."
She began to laugh.