“Well, here we are again, my love!” he cried, and devoured her hands with ghostly kisses. “It seems an eternity that I've been struggling back to you through the outer void and what-not. Sometimes, I confess I all but despaired. Life is not, I assure you, all beer and skittles for the disembodied.”
He drew a long breath, and his gaze upon her and the entire chamber seemed to envelop all and cherish it.
“Little room, little room! And so you are thus! Do you know,” he continued, with vivacity, “I have wondered about it in the grave, and I could hardly sleep for this place unpenetrated. Heigho! What a lot of things we leave undone! I dashed this off at the time, the literary passion strong in me, thus:
“Now, when all is done, and I lie so low,
I cannot sleep for this, my only care;
For though of that dim place I could not know;
That where my heart was fain I did not go,
Nor saw you musing there!
“Well, well, these things irk a ghost so. Naturally, as soon as possible I made my way back—to be satisfied—to be satisfied that you were still mine.” He bent a piercing look upon her.
“I observe by the calendar on your writing-table that some years have elapsed since my——um——since I expired,” he added, with a faint blush. It appears that the matter of their dissolution is, in conversation, rather kept in the background by well-bred ghosts.
“Heigho! How time does fly! You'll be joining me soon, my dear.”
She drew herself splendidly up, and he was aware of her beauty in the full of its tenacious excellence—of the delicate insolence of Life looking upon Death—of the fact that she had forgotten him.
He rose, and confronted this, his trembling hands thrust into his pockets, then turned away to hide the dismay of his countenance. He was, however, a spook of considerable spirit, and in a jiffy he met the occasion. To her blank, indignant gaze he drew a card from his case, and, taking a pencil from the secretary, wrote, beneath the name:
Quiet to the breast
Wheresoe'er it be,
That gave an hour's rest
To the heart of me.
Quiet to the breast
Till it lieth dead,
And the heart be clay
Where I visited.
Quiet to the breast,
Though forgetting quite
The guest it sheltered once;
To the heart, good night!