"You have known ...?" faltered Vera.
"Yes, I knew such a case. In the final hour of an ebbing life the chain of wedded love that death had broken was reunited, and the wife died with her last long gaze turned to the vision of her husband. Her last word was 'reunited!'"
Vera was strangely impressed. It was not easy for the unbelieving to make a mock of Mr. Symeon's creed. The force of his convictions, the ideas that he had cultivated and brooded upon for the larger part of his life, had so possessed the man, that even scoffers were sometimes moved by his absolute sincerity, and found themselves, as it were unawares, treating his theories almost seriously. For Vera, in whom imagination was the greater part of mind, there was no inclination to scoff, but rather a most earnest desire that the spiritualist's creed might be justified by her own experience, that it might be granted to her to sit in the melancholy solitude of that room, with a volume of Browning on her lap, and to feel that the poet was near her, that an invisible spirit was breathing enlightenment into her mind, as she read the dying words of the beloved apostle in "A Death in the Desert," which had been to her as a new gospel—and to know that when she raised her eyes to the portrait on the wall, it was not the dead, but the living upon whom she looked.
This was involved in the creed of her Church—the Communion of Saints.
Were not the gifted, who had lived free from all the grossness of clay, from the taint of earthly sin, worthy to be numbered among the saints, and like them gifted with perpetual life, perpetual fellowship with the faithful who adored them?
When he left the great, silent house Mr. Symeon knew that he had made a proselyte. Though Vera had said little, it was impossible to mistake the fervour with which she had welcomed his revelation of the spirit world. Here was a mind in want of new interests, a heart yearning for something that the world could not give.
She sat by the dying fire, in the gathering darkness, long after her visitor had left her. Yes, this had been her need of late—something to think of, something to wish for. Her life—so over full of the things that women desire, pomp and luxury, troops of friends, jewels and fine clothes, the "too much" that money always brings with it—had vacant spaces, and hours of vague depression, in which the sense of loneliness became an aching pain.