We sat down and looked at one another. There was a singular pinched look about my mother's mouth.
"Sarah."
"Yes."
"She says"—and then she told me what she said. She had seen Alice Stuart in a Western town, seven hundred miles away. Among the living, she desired to be counted of the dead. And that was all.
My mother paced the room three times back and forth, her hands locked.
"Sarah." There was a chill in her voice—it had been such a gentle voice!—that froze me. "Sarah, the girl is an impostor."
"Mother!"
She paced the room, once more, three times, back and forth. "At any rate, she is a poor, self-deluded creature. How can she see, seven hundred miles away, a dead woman who has been an angel all these years? Think! an angel, Sarah! So much better than I, and I—I loved—"
Before or since, I never heard my mother speak like that. She broke off sharply, and froze back into her chilling voice.
"We will say nothing about this, if you please. I do not believe a word of it."