Chrissalyn wept afresh, but heroically went on, and the Colonel wrote:
“Mrs. Doring, why didn’t you attend my funeral?”
Cartice looked aghast, the question, at first blush, being so extraordinary. At some length she explained that she was too ill to go. Evidently reading her unspoken thought, he wrote:
“Yes, I was present—the real I as well as the silent image of me in the box. I looked around at my leisure, and saw everybody there. I wondered at your absence, you and Chriss being such close friends. Besides, you were always nice to me, too, God bless you!”
At this tribute to her kindness from beyond the grave Cartice dropped a grateful tear. The Colonel’s nature had something childlike and sweet in it, in spite of its many defects. Most of his faults had been of a peevish and childish order.
“Thank you, Colonel Layton,” Cartice answered. “I am glad to hear from you.”
“Mrs. Doring, do you remember the conversation I had with you an hour or so before I made the final journey?”
“Perfectly.”
“I sang about death being a narrow sea that divides your world from the land of pure delight. Well, it’s a very narrow sea—so narrow we can step across. In fact it isn’t a sea at all, for the two worlds are not really divided. They only seem to be.”
Several times Mrs. Layton’s friend, Jessie, came. When asked whether she threw flowers at her own funeral, she said she did; that she knew beforehand that Chriss had the faculty of seeing certain things others could not, and had it in mind before she went away that she would do something to prove that death was only an illusion.