"I imagined I did, and at the same time I knew I didn't."
"Yes," she said quietly, "you did see it, Dr. Westland. You have seen it more than once. You will see it again."
A heavier colour dyed his face; he started impatiently as though to check her—as though to speak; and did not.
She said: "If what I say is distasteful to you, please stop me." She waited a moment; then, as he evinced no desire to check or interrupt her: "I am very diffident about saying this to you—to a man so justly celebrated—pre-eminent in the greatest of all professions. I am so insignificant in comparison, so unimportant, so ignorant where you are experienced and learned.
"But may I say to you that nothing dies? I am not referring to a possible spiritual world inhabited perhaps by souls. I mean that here, on this earth, all around us, nothing that has ever lived really dies.... Is what I say distasteful to you?"
He offered no reply.
"Because," she said in a low voice, "if I say anything more it would concern you. And what you saw.... For what you saw was alive, and real—as truly living as you and I are. It is nothing to wonder at, nothing to trouble or perplex you, to see clearly—anybody—you have ever—loved."
He looked up at her in a silence so strained, so longing, so intense, that she felt the terrific tension.
"Yes," she said, "you saw clearly and truly when you saw—her."