“Yes, indeed, we can shut up shop until she is herself again. She is better off right there.”
Dr. Coles carried her from his car up the stairs and laid her on her little bed in her pigeon-hole of a room.
“You are very good to me, Dr. Coles. You remember how Grandpa Jim called the wireless I got from Danny a message from the spirit world—well I have had another—it was strange, very strange. You see, the telephone service had been discontinued at the big house but, just as I entered the front door, the telephone bell rang. It was strange that I was there, but something had been driving me all day to go home—it is rented now, tenants coming in to-morrow. I was glad when Josie telephoned she was not coming back to the shop for supper. It gave me a chance to go home and go alone. I felt I must see it once more. I wanted to be alone—alone with those who have gone. It seemed to me as though their voices were calling me—”
“Yes.”
“When the telephone rang, I ran to it as fast as I could. The house was almost dark but I had my flashlight—I could hardly hear what was said, but knew some one wanted me—I thought it was a long distance message—”
“Was it?”
“Yes, a very long distance! Dr. Coles, it seemed to be Danny. It wasn’t quite like him because he sounded so far away. I couldn’t really say for sure that it was a voice at all. It might have been my imagination—it might have been—I don’t know what—but oh, Dr. Coles, it said—it said—‘Are you well, my beloved?’ faintly but distinctly, and I tried to answer but everything got black before me and I didn’t know anything more until you came into the room. Josie seemed to have some kind of intuition that I had gone home because she found me, didn’t she?”
Josie was controlling her sobs with difficulty while Mary Louise was telling the doctor what had happened. Josie never cried and it was a novel experience to the girl to be overcome with tears just when her dear Mary Louise needed her most. But it was so pathetic to see her little friend more or less out of her mind. She was sure that was the case. The ghostly old house, so full of memories, had got on her nerves and the memory of her grandfather’s having thought the wireless from Danny was from the spirit world had come back to her and she had fancied a message over the telephone.
Dr. Coles mixed up two doses of aromatic ammonia and made Josie swallow one and the patient the other. He then called Josie to the front of the shop and told her Mary Louise must be kept quiet for a day or so even if it meant closing the shop.
Josie responded promptly: