And for the first time in all the years I had known her Essie was shaken with sudden weeping.
“That was three years ago,” she said brokenly.
For a time we sat in silence hand in hand.
“And do you still go back there?”
“Every night.”
“And you meet him?”
“Yes and no. I am sometimes aware of his presence, but I never see him clearly as I did that once. I think at that moment I was able to see him because I was so near death that I was very close to those on the other side of death. My spirit had almost freed itself from the body, so I became visible to him and he to me. I have studied the pictures of Charles the First’s time, and his dress was exactly of that date, almost the same as that well-known picture—I think it is Charles the First—of a man with his hand on his hip, standing beside a white horse. Do you think it is wrong of me to have a ghostly lover, who must have lived nearly three hundred years ago?”
“Not wrong, but strange. It is a little like “The Brushwood Boy,” and “Peter Ibbetson,” and Stella Benson’s “This is the end.” I suppose we have all been on this earth before, but the cup of Lethe is well mixed for most of us, and we have no memory of previous lives. But you have not drunk the cup to the dregs, and somehow you have made a hole in the curtain of oblivion in two places. Through one of those holes you saw one of your many childhoods, probably in Greece, a couple of thousand years ago. Through the other hole you saw, in comparatively modern times your early womanhood. Perhaps you married your beautiful cavalier with the curls.”
“No,” said Essie with decision, “I have never been married to him, or lived in his house. It is my home, but I have never lived there. I know nothing about him except that we love each other, and that some day we shall really meet, not in a dream.”
“In the Elysian fields?”