But Lucy denied it. 'No, Miriam, I never heard them anywhere else. They belong to you and your house, and they mean something good, and sweet, and coming, not gone by. They're not ghosts.'
And when at last Miriam kissed her good-bye at the train, Lucy was saying, 'I'm glad to think of you, there in your nice sunny house, with the Voices, and the Music. Good-bye, dear.'
As Miriam sat alone that evening, she wondered about those young happy presences. She wished that she could hear them laugh and sing and play; not merely feel them blindly stirring about her. She sat, deep in reverie, smiling at Lucy's merry yet honest insistence upon her quaint little hallucination,—at herself for more than half believing it.
'It is better that I never hear them,' she concluded at last, rather soberly. 'I couldn't live alone this way if I heard them. It is all well enough for Lucy, with her husband and her houseful of babies, to hear things like that; granting that she truly did, dear mysterious Lucy!—But if I heard them—if I heard them,—' she glanced about the room as if she half expected to see a gay face above the piano, a bright head bending by the lamp,—'it would mean that I was going a little bit mad: yes, just a little bit mad, for all that they are sweet, young voices.'
She shivered, stood up quickly, and went over to the long mirror. 'Miriam,' she whispered, looking into the shadowy face that met hers, 'Lucy said those were young voices, coming voices, not gone by. But you know, Miriam, that if they are, they belong to some one else who may live in this house: to some one else, I tell you, not to you at all. Don't be a fool.—You've been quite sensible so far: don't spoil it all now. Do you hear? you mustn't even wish to hear those Voices, or that lovely harp-music. Now you understand.'
Months later she saw her friend again. 'How are the Voices?' Lucy asked gayly, across the laughing baby who pulled at her necktie and snatched down her curls.
'I never hear them,' Miriam answered, almost shortly. 'You know, don't you,—"to him that hath shall be given"?—Please may I hold the baby?'
III
Yet often, when she had spent a part of the day or evening away from home, she had a curious expectation of returning to find her house not empty and silent, but with something alive in it to greet her. She did not think of the people who had been her own in the different days so far past, nor of her living friends, nor of the young presences whose laughter Lucy had insisted upon hearing. It seemed to her simply that there was more life and motion and personality in her waiting house, than just Diogenes crouching on the front porch, and the kettle steaming to itself on the back of the stove.
One winter evening she walked late down the village street. The moon rode high and white. Every frosty breath shone, every step creaked and crackled in the snow. Through the thin leafless maple-trunks and lilac-boughs she could see her house plainly: the snowy roof, glittering to the moon, the low eaves, ragged with silver icicles, and the four yellow windows of the hall and sitting-room, which she had lighted against her late return.