Then I heard him give a short, groaning cry. He stepped forward, opening his arms, and I saw the phantasm slide between them. For a second it stood there, folded to his breast; then suddenly, before our eyes, it collapsed in a shining heap, a flicker of light on the floor, at his feet.
Then that went out too.
III
I never saw it again.
Neither did my brother. But I didn’t know this till some time afterwards; for, somehow, we hadn’t cared to speak about it. And in the end it was he who spoke first.
We were sitting together in that room, one evening in November, when he said, suddenly and irrelevantly:
“Helen—do you never see her now?”
“No,” I said—“Never!”
“Do you think, then, she doesn’t come?”
“Why should she?” I said. “She found what she came for. She knows what she wanted to know.”