“Perfectly,” replied Miss Dewsnep. “And yet,” she continued with a mystified look, “it can’t be; for I saw him passed through the bronze doors into the cremation furnace. I saw him with my own eyes,” she added, somewhat unnecessarily. “And what’s more, I saw his ashes in the casket.”
She gazed with wide-open eyes at Thorndyke, and then at her friend, and the two women tiptoed forward and once more stared in at the window with starting eyes and dropped chins.
“It is Mr. Bendelow,” said Miss Bonington, in an awe-stricken voice.
“But it can’t be,” Miss Dewsnep protested in tremulous tones. “You saw him put through those doors yourself, Susan, and you saw his ashes afterwards.”
“I can’t help that, Sarah,” the other lady retorted. “This is Mr. Bendelow. You can’t deny that it is.”
“Our eyes must be deceived,” said Miss Dewsnep, the said eyes being still riveted on the face within the window. “It can’t be—and yet it is—but yet it is impossible⸺”
She paused suddenly, and raised a distinctly alarmed face to her friend.
“Susan,” she said, in a low, rather shaky voice, “there is something here with which we, as Christian women, are better not concerned. Something against nature. The dead has been recalled from a burning fiery furnace by some means which we may not inquire into. It were better, Susan, that we should now depart from this place.”
This was evidently Susan’s opinion, too, for she assented with uncommon alacrity and with a distinctly uncomfortable air; and the pair moved with one accord towards the door. But Thorndyke gently detained them.
“Do we understand,” he asked, “that, apart from the apparently impossible circumstances, the body in that coffin is, in your opinion, the body of the late Simon Bendelow?”