“Yes?”
“She opened the door, which she had omitted to do before, and when she came in she denied having been there already. She owned that she had been hurrying through her work, and thinking of mine, so as to make me do something, or undo something, to it; and then all at once she lost her impatience, and came up at her leisure. I don’t exactly like to tell what she wanted.”
He began to laugh provokingly, and she said, tranquilly, “I don’t mind your telling Mr. Wanhope.”
“Well, then, strictly in the interest of psychomancy, I will confide that she had found some traces of a model that I used to paint my Madonnas from, before we were married, in that picture. She had slept on her suspicion, and then when she could not stand it any longer, she had come up in the spirit to say that she was not going to be mixed up in a Madonna with any such minx. The words are mine, but the meaning was Marion’s. When she found me taking the minx out, she went quietly back to washing her dishes, and then returned in the body to give me a sitting.”
III.
We were silent a moment, till I asked, “Is this true, Mrs. Alderling?”
“About,” she said. “I don’t remember the storm, exactly.”
“Well, I don’t see why you bother to remain in the body at all,” I remarked.
“We haven’t arranged just how to leave it together,” said Alderling. “Marion, here, if I managed to get off first, would have no means of knowing whether her theory of the effect of my unbelief on my future was right or not; and if _she_ gave _me_ the slip, she would always be sorry that she had not stayed here to convert me.”
“Why don’t you agree that if either of you lives again, he or she shall make some sign to let the other know?” I suggested. “Well, that has been tried so often, and has it ever worked? It’s open to the question whether the dead do not fail to show up because they are forbidden to communicate with the living; and you are just where you were, as to the main point. No, I don’t see any way out of it.”