"Oh yes, I do, although I was quite small when she died. Father says I fancy some of the things I remember. Perhaps I do. I always dream very vividly. And fact and dream are easily confused in a child's mind. My most distinct memories are detached, like pictures, without any before or after to explain them. There is one, for instance, about waking up in the woods at night, wrapped in my mother's shawl and seeing her face, all frightened and white, with the moon, like a great, silver eye, shining through the trees. But I can't imagine why my mother would be hiding in the woods at night."
"Why hiding?"
"There is a sense of hiding that comes with the memory—without anything to account for it But, although I do not remember connected incidents very well, I remember her—the feeling of having her with me. And the terrible emptiness afterwards. If she had gone quite away, all at once, I couldn't have borne it."
"Do you mean that she had a long illness?" asked Spence, greatly interested.
"No. She died suddenly. It was just—you will call it silly imagination—" she broke off uncertainly.
"I might call it imagination without the adjective."
"Yes. But it wasn't. It was real. The sense, I mean, that she hadn't gone away. Nothing that wasn't real would have been of the slightest use."
"It all depends on how we define reality. What seems real at one time may seem unreal at another."
She nodded.
"That is just what has happened. I am not sure, now. The sense of nearness left me as I grew up. But at that time, I lived by it. Do you find the idea absurd?"