“Her power with me is weakening,” said Simon, “as Vavasour’s is with you. Our outlines are no longer so clear as they used to be, which proves that our astral individualities are less strongly impressed upon the brains of our earthly sponsors than they were. We are still materialized; but how long this will continue——” He sighed and shrugged his shoulders.
“Don’t let us wait for a formal dismissal, then,” said Katie boldly. “Let us throw up our respective situations.”
“I remember enough of the Marriage Service to make our union, if not regular, at least respectable,” said Simon.
“And I know quite a fashionable place on the Outside Edge of Things, where we could settle down,” said Katie, “and live practically on nothing.”
I blinked at that moment. When I saw the room again clearly, the chairs beside our respective pillows were empty.
Years have passed, and neither Vavasour nor myself has ever had a glimpse of the spirits whom we were the means of introducing to one another. We are quite content to know ourselves deprived for ever of their company. Yet sometimes, when I look at our three babies, I wonder whether that establishment of Simon’s and Katie’s on the Outside Edge of Things includes a nursery.
THE WIDOW’S MITE
People bestowed that nickname upon little Lord Garlingham years ago, when he was the daintiest of human playthings ever adored by a young mother. Shutting my eyes, I can recall him, all golden curls and frills, sitting on the front seat of the victoria with Toto, the Maltese. Japanese pugs had not then come into fashion, nor the ubiquitous automobile. Gar is the Widow’s Mite still, but for other reasons. He was a charming, irresolute, impulsive child, who invariably meant “macaroons” when he said “sponge cake.” It recurs to me that he was passionately fond of dolls, not nigger Sambo dolls, or sailor dolls, or Punchinelli with curved caps and bells, or policemen with large feet so cunningly weighted that it is next door to impossible to knock them over, but frilled and furbelowed dollies of the gentler sex. There was a blue princess in tulle with a glass chandelier-drop tiara, and a dancing girl in pink, and a stout, shapeless, rag lady, whose features were painted on the calico ball that represented her head, and whose hair resembled the fringe of a black woollen shawl. Holding her by one leg, Gar would sink to sleep upon his lace-trimmed pillows in a halo of shining curls, and Lady Garlingham’s last new friend or latest new adorer would be brought up to the night nursery for an after-dinner peep at “my precious in his cot.”
“My precious” was equally charming in his Eton days, when his sleepy green eyes looked up at you from under a lock of fair silky hair that was never to be kept within regulation School bounds, but continually strayed upon the fair, if freckled, expanse of a brow which might have been the home of a pure and innocent mind, and probably was not. He had a pleasant treble boy’s voice and a beautiful smile, particularly when his mother told him he might smoke just one cigarette, of her own special brand, as a great treat.
“Mother’s are hay,” he said afterwards in confidence, and added that he preferred cut Cavendish, and that the best way to induce a meerschaum to color was to smoke it foul, and never to remove the dottle. But Lady Garlingham was never the wiser. She had the utmost faith in her boy.