I was well enough informed in occultism by now to realize that this spectral apparition had not put in its last appearance. It would keep on coming, like Hamlet’s ghost, until its tragedy was explained. That was what was keeping it near this plane, hovering about the scene of its death till it had made itself understood. Not until the evil done to it in life had been revenged could its spirit move on into the higher astral regions and be at peace with the infinite. As long as I did not know how the child had died, I might be sure of phantoms.
“Poor Mattie!” sighed Mrs. Dove.
“Her coffin wasn’t there,” said I.
“Of course not!”
“Where did they bury her?”
“They didn’t bury her.”
But before my horror had reached articulation she added, absent-mindedly, “They never found her.”
I put my bag of beach-plums down and began to reconstruct my ideas. What had been told me and what I had imagined were confused in my mind.
“Do you mean to say,” I asked, “that they never found Mattie out there on the flats, caught in the lobster-pots after the tide had gone out?”
“Law!” said Mrs. Dove, “She went out with it. They scarcely ever gets ’em back from behind the breakwater. The current is too strong.”