Only the chair she had loved remained in its place by the side of the hearth—her chair, if you could call it hers when she wasn’t allowed to sit in it. It was always empty, for by tacit consent we both avoided it.
We would sit there for hours at a time without speaking, while he worked and I read or sewed. I never dared to ask him whether he sometimes had, as I had, the sense of Cicely’s presence there, in that room which she had so longed to enter, from which she had been so cruelly shut out. You couldn’t tell what he felt or didn’t feel. My brother’s face was a heavy, sombre mask; his back, bent over the writing-table, a wall behind which he hid himself.
You must know that twice in my life I have more than felt these presences; I have seen them. This may be because I am on both sides a Highland Celt, and my mother had the same uncanny gift. I had never spoken of these appearances to Donald because he would have put it all down to what he calls my hysterical fancy. And I am sure that if he ever felt or saw anything himself he would never own it.
I ought to explain that each time the vision was premonitory of a death (in Cicely’s case I had no such warning), and each time it only lasted for a second; also that, though I am certain I was wide awake each time, it is open to anybody to say I was asleep and dreamed it. The queer thing was that I was neither frightened nor surprised.
And so I was neither surprised nor frightened now, the first evening that I saw her.
It was in the early autumn twilight, about six o’clock. I was sitting in my place in front of the fireplace; Donald was in his arm-chair on my left, smoking a pipe, as usual, before the lamplight drove him out of doors into the dark.
I had had so strong a sense of Cicely’s being there in the room that I felt nothing but a sudden sacred pang that was half joy when I looked up and saw her sitting in her chair on my right.
The phantasm was perfect and vivid, as if it had been flesh and blood. I should have thought that it was Cicely herself if I hadn’t known that she was dead. She wasn’t looking at me; her face was turned to Donald with that longing, wondering look it used to have, searching his face for the secret that he kept from her.
... her face was turned to Donald ...