ngue with my own flesh-and-blood fingers, and a hearty
objurgation on the professional blunder which I had come in time to
rectify.

"Dr. Halt," said Dr. Gazell, slowly, "with your approval I think I will
change my mind. On the whole, the indications point to--this. I trust
it is the appropriate remedy."

He removed the cork from the phial as he spoke, and, rising, passed
quickly to the bedside of the child.

The mother had now arisen from her knees, and followed him, and got her
arms about the boy again, and set her soul to brooding over him in the
way that loving women have. I was of no further service to her, and I
had vanished from her thought, which had no more room at that moment
for anything except the child than the arms with which she clasped him.

It amazed me--I was going to say it appalled me--that no person in the
room should seem to have consciousness of her presence. She was like
an invisible star. How incredible that love like that, and the power
of it, could be dependent upon the paltry senses of what are called
live people for so much as the proofs of its existence.

"It is not scientific," I caught myself saying, as I turned away,
"there is a flaw in the logic somewhere. There seems to be a snapped
link between two sets of facts. There is no deficiency of data; the
difficulty lies wholly in collating them."

How, indeed, should I--how did I but a few days since--myself regard
such "data" as presumed to indicate the continuance of human life
beyond the point of physical decay!

"After all," I thought, as I wandered from the house in which I felt
myself forgotten and superfluous, and pursued my lonely way, I knew not
whither and I knew not why,--"after all, there is another life. I
really did not think it."

It seemed now to have been an extraordinary narrowness of intellect in
me that I had not at least attached more weight to the universal human
hypothesis. I did not precisely wonder from a personal point of view
that I had not definitely believed it; but I wondered that I had not
given the possibility the sort of attention which a view of so much
dignity deserved. It really annoyed me that I had made that kind of
mistake.

We, at least, were alive,--my old patient and I. Whether others, or
how many, or of what sort, I could not tell; I had yet seen no other
spirit. What was the life-force in this new condition of things?
Where was the central cell? What _made_ us go on living?