dead!

They were all there in her heart, the dead and the living, and not
divided off at all like in most folks' minds.

I used to wonder about Moira, too, when she'd have these quiet
spells--like she was _listening_, but not to any sounds. Then next you'd
feel as if she was gladder than anything you'd ever known, sitting there
so still with that listening look on her face--only now like I told you,
as if she'd _heard_. She'd be so happy inside that you'd like to be near
her, as if there was a light in her heart so you could warm yourself by
it.

It's hard to tell just how I came to feel this. I suppose just by living
with folks you get to know all sorts of things about them. It's not the
things they say that matters. I knew a woman once, a pleasant-spoken
body, yet she'd pizen the air about her by the unspoken thoughts of her
heart. Sometimes these thoughts would burst out in awful fits of
anger--but you'd know how she was inside, if she spoke to you always as
gentle as a dove.

I'd like to be near Moira those times and yet it made me uneasy, too,
her sitting so still, listening, and Mis' MacFarland, as you might say,
always looking over the edge of eternity. It was all right for _her_ but
I'd wonder about Moira. I wondered so hard I took it up with Mis'
MacFarland.

"Do you think you're doing right by that child?" I asked her right out
plain.

"Why, how do you mean?" she says in her calm way.

"Teaching her things that's all right for us older people to know but
that don't seem to me are for young things."

"Teaching her things!" says Mis' MacFarland. "I haven't taught Moira
nothing. If you mean them still, quiet, happy spells of hers, she's
always had 'em. _She_ taught _me_. It was watching her when she was
little that taught me----"

"Taught you what?" I asked her when she wouldn't go on.

"It's hard to say it in words--taught me how near all the rest is."

I didn't get her, so I asked what she meant by "the rest."

"The rest of creation!" says she. "Some folks is born in the world
feeling and knowing it in their hearts that creation don't stop where
the sight of the eyes stop, and the thinner the veil is the better, and
something in them sickens when the veil gets too thick."

"You talk like you believed in spooks and God knows what," I says, but
more to make myself comfortable than anything else.

"You know what I mean, Jane McQuarry," says she. "There's very few
folks, especially older ones, wh