“Sure? Good Lord—” It was my turn to stare. “Do you suspect me of not being quite right yet?” I suggested with an uneasy laugh.
“No—no ... of course not ... but I don’t understand.”
“Understand what? I went into the house.... I saw everything, in fact, but her grave....”
“Her grave?” Grace jumped up, clasping her hands on her breast and darting away from me. At the other end of the room she stood and gazed, and then moved slowly back.
“Then, after all—I wonder?” She held her eyes on me, half fearful and half reassured. “Could it be simply that you never heard?”
“Never heard?”
“But it was in all the papers! Don’t you ever read them? I meant to write.... I thought I had written ... but I said: ‘At any rate he’ll see it in the papers’.... You know I’m always lazy about letters....”
“See what in the papers?”
“Why, that she didn’t die.... She isn’t dead! There isn’t any grave, my dear man! It was only a cataleptic trance.... An extraordinary case, the doctors say.... But didn’t she tell you all about it—if you say you saw her?” She burst into half-hysterical laughter: “Surely she must have told you that she wasn’t dead?”
“No,” I said slowly, “she didn’t tell me that.”