We were both silent for a time, and without any encouragement Gabrielle resumed her story, but she had freed herself from my arms, and walked to the center of her room—its walls were well filled with pretty colored prints, for the most part religious figures—and with her hands crossed behind her back, stood before me and continued—and now her rueful expression, and the rebuking tenderness of her eyes, had disappeared, and in their place was an old familiar smile, inexplicably reminiscent, like a visible soliloquy. It often arose to her face and it became her.
"I waited for the visitation again and again, putting myself in the same position, and shutting out the light, and—praying. It came once, a few months after the first, and then I thought it was some forewarning of danger to father or mother, or to you Alfred, and I dreaded to open my eyes in the mornings, fearing disaster, sickness—I know not what; and then Alfred it suddenly seemed to me it meant that it was my own summons!"
"And when it came the second time, was it different?" I almost cried aloud, abruptly guessing that it portended mischief to Blanchette.
"No, quite the same, but less bright and more restless, changing in its brightness, and flitting slowly up the walls and back again, and never forming a figure as at the first. But something else was different; O! much different—The Voices. They were stronger, and Alfred it is the voices now that fill my ears at night with callings, and singular messages, that I cannot understand, and Alfred," she came closer to me, and her voice, sinking to a whisper, seemed almost stealthy; "I have spells of fainting. Mother has picked me up many times and I have heard her talking to father about it, and they have written to the doctors in the Training School and— Well you know it is all settled, but Alfred it will not help me. I dread it. I shall be unhappy."
The forlorn misery returned to her eyes, and the despairing gesture, as she brought her hands forward and leaned them against my shoulders and with a keen interrogation fixed her gaze upon my own, revealed her unwillingness to go to Paris. She went on:
"In those trances—if they are really trances—the voices come in all sorts of ways to me. I cannot understand it; it scares me and yet I have grown to wish to hear them—some of them. For they are very, very different. Some voices are like children talking low, almost lisping, and always musical, and others are cold and hard; but—Alfred, is not this wonderful? I can drive those hard, stern voices off, by just wishing them away; my mind does it somehow, and the others come to me when I wish them to—O! but it is marvelous."
Her eyes were lit again with a saintly joy—a little wild I thought—and for a moment I shuddered at the thought that perhaps Gabrielle was losing her mind, under the stress of her hallucinations. Ah! but were they hallucinations? I was not unwilling to believe them. Both Gabrielle and I had indulged in the reading of ghostly tales, when children, and because it was just a little difficult for us to gratify our fancy for the weird and the supernatural—all the eccentricities of the disembodied—we had loved them the more.