"Brother, you do not know what you are asking me. It is impossible—it would rob me of life, for I should not know then whether to really live in this world and to die in the other, or to leave you and mother, and father and home here, and to live the more glorious life beyond. Now I live in both worlds. Yes truly—in the mornings the clouds of angels waken me, through the nights my bed-side is covered with the spread haloes of the dead, and in my ears sound the sweetest whispers, and salutations of the saints. Throughout the day, if I only shut my eyes, and ask for their appearing, the visions continue, and even my face is brushed by fairy hands, or my lips feel the imprint of unseen, unknown faces."
My sister's face shone with an interior illumination, impossible to describe, and as she talked to me I felt the astonishment that might come to one who converses with some incarnate spirit. It did appeal to my sympathy, for I lived now myself half immersed in the daily contemplation of another world; it met my own anticipations vividly, and I could not condemn, nor evade its fascination. But I wondered and so questioned her more closely.
"Gabrielle, how can all this be? You have never said such things to me before, as if you were moving in a spirit-land with your feet in this world, and your head lifted above the stars. What does it mean? I knew something, but this tumult—fourmillement—of apparitions I knew nothing of."
"No, Alfred, I know you did not, though it has often been on my tongue to let you know how the visitations multiplied. I think, Alfred, it really is, as St. Paul says, that we are encompassed by a cloud of witnesses, or this world is itself unreal, and the realities are elsewhere; perhaps that everything about us, could we for an instant strip them of their appearances, would be something else—you see?—something else, and this atmosphere," she lifted her hand upward, shook it rapidly, causing little puffs of air against my face, "was loaded with currents of the dead!"
We both got up and walked slowly towards the house.
"Of course you have said nothing of any of these things to mother or father?" I queried.
"Ah, Alfred, I could not. They would not understand, and then why—why should I?"
After a pause: "Alfred, it will do no harm. Do not think me mad, or deluded, or—or—unbalanced, as they say, even. I cannot make it plain perhaps—but this I know—they are there—they, the spirits—" and she waved her hand up and down—"and when I call them they come, and they come when I do not call."
She was almost laughing now, and studying her attentively I could not see any of those symptoms in feature, or eyes, or voice, or manner, that betray to the alienist the disordered brain. Gabrielle never to me looked lovelier.
The next moment as we entered the hall-way I caught her arm and turned her abruptly to myself; "Gabrielle, show me Blanchette."