And then she recalled to her mind something which a great thinker had said in her presence.
"Some day," he had said, "we may stumble across the natural means of communication with the dead, and, like all other great discoveries, it will seem simple. The difficulties are insuperable in the present state of knowledge among the living; and the dead have to recover from the shock of death, and to find readjustment to altered conditions of existence. But there is all Time in which to work out the discovery; and there is always the chance that we may find out the great truth by an accident of detail in our researches and reflections."
"But the dead have to recover from the shock of death." What was it he meant? Death was a shock to the nervous system of the living; but to the dead themselves surely it was——Ah, that was just the whole mystery; and the chemist, the philosopher, the poet, the musician, the explorer, the priest, and herself, an ordinary unilluminated person of average intelligence,—all were mere surmisers—mere surmisers....
Then the door was gently opened, and Katharine, leaving with a sigh of relief the regions of surmise, came back to actual life; for, first and foremost, she was human, and the earth was her territory. The woman of the Gaard said something to her, and beckoned to her. Katharine followed her out of the room, and tried to understand what she was saying, but could only gather the words, "To Engelske" (Two Englishmen). The woman, who seemed greatly harassed, took her straight to the "Peise-stue," pointed in a despairing way to two men, said, "Engelsk," and hurried off, holding her hands to her head, as though things were too much for her. Katharine saw two Englishmen sitting warming themselves before the fire. They turned round as she came in, and she noticed at a glance that the elder of the two was the exact image of the dead man upstairs.
"Then you got my telegram," she said, thinking at once of the telegram which she had sent off to three of the mountain sanatoria.
"Telegram?" said the elder man, looking at her in a puzzled way. "What telegram? I've had no telegram; could have had no telegram. I, my friend, and my brother have been out in the mountains fishing; but my brother left us. The storm came on; he did not return, and we made our way down here, hoping to find him or get some news of him. Perhaps you can tell us something; for the woman of the house does not understand a word we say, and we don't understand her. We are quite bewildered, and so is she."
Katharine looked at the two Englishmen, and saw that they were worn out, wet through, and hopelessly at a loss. Her protective instincts for those who were in trouble leapt up within her. She was not going to suffer these tired fellows to have any unnecessary shock, and so she took the precaution of asking the elder man his name.
It was the name of the dead man upstairs.
Then in the gentlest manner possible, as though she had known this stranger years instead of minutes, Katharine broke the sad news to him.