Anne felt a thrill of terror. What if this were not a dream? "I am not dead?" She looked at Marian with frightened, questioning eyes.
"You must be dead," was the answer, "else how should you be here? Your mother used to write me that you had unusual powers; I never had. You might, as a mortal, possibly see me, but I could not be conscious of you unless you were as real as myself."
Anne stared hard at her companion. "I have, it is true," said she, "imagined I saw spirits, but they were not like you; they were phantoms, ghosts, immaterial." She hesitated, and then took Marian's hand in hers. "This hand is as solid as my own. If I believed you were dead—if I thought I was—dead—myself, oh, it would be appalling!"
"My dear Anne," said Marian, "we are both spirits; we were always spirits, only in the body we were chained spirits. Material or immaterial only means a point of view, not a difference."
"I am no spirit," said Anne. "I am of the earth, and the flesh; all my thoughts are with, and on the earth, and of the earth. As to you, Marian, I don't know. There is an uncertainty in my mind—no, I mean an enlightenment; I don't know what to call it—an apprehension. Marian, do you mind? I thought heaven was a very different place. I should expect something more serious, more solemn. The idea of an everlasting sabbath used to depress me. I have no desire for such a state——"
"Heaven! Heaven! Did you think you were in heaven? Oh, no, this is not heaven. I trust there may be a heaven, and a future life, but this is not heaven. I only know about this world in which I exist, and that it is immeasurably better than that other world we have both happily left."
"It is all so different from one's dreams," said Anne. "Dreams," she repeated; "dreams. Marian, did you long for those you left behind? Were you lonely without them? Or were you with them, following all their affairs with sympathy and understanding?"
"No," replied Marian, "I knew no more of my loved ones in the past life than they knew of me. That is the worst of it, both now and before; the separation, the waiting. I wish I had had more faith in the old days. I wish my faith were greater now. My dearest ones left me when I was no more than thirty, and I was eighty when I died. It was a long waiting. You were a little child, then, and you must have been well in years when——"
"Don't, don't!" cried Anne; "don't repeat that dreadful word! I am not, I cannot be! And yet I know, and hate the knowledge, that it must come to me very soon, for I am, as you say, an old woman. Let me enjoy this beautiful dream wherein I am still young. But is this youth? When I look at you, Marian, you are not old, but you are not young. My intellect will not conceive it what it is."
"If you would only believe me," said Marian, "that we are both relieved of the burden of the flesh with all its infirmities and limitations. It is that, only that. There can be no pain where there is no flesh to suffer."