"I have no doubt about them. I know my mother often came to me."
"How? I don't quite understand. You never saw her—in this world I mean—did you?"
"No. But she has come to me. For years I saw her in dreams. More than once, years ago, when I woke up in the night, I saw her hovering over me."
"That must have been fancy."
"No, it was not." She spoke with calm assurance, and with no suggestion of morbidness or fear. "Why should I not see her?" she went on. "I am her child, and if she had lived she would have cared for me, fended for me, because she loved me. Why should what we call death keep her from doing that still, only in a different way?"
Dick was silent a few seconds. It did not seem at all strange.
"No; there seems no real reason why, always assuming that there are angels, and that they have the power to speak to us. But there is something I would like to ask you. You said just now, 'I know that my mother often came to me.' Has she ceased coming?"
Beatrice Stanmore's eyes seemed filled with a great wonder, but she still spoke in the same calm assured tones.
"I have not seen her for three years," she said; "not since the day after you left Wendover. She told me then that she was going farther away for a time, and would not be able to speak to me, although she would allow no harm to happen to me. Since that time I have never seen her. But I know she loves me still. It may be that I shall not see her again in this life, but sometime, in God's own good time, we shall meet."
"Are you a Spiritualist?" asked Dick, and even as he spoke he felt that he had struck a false note.