uppose I stand there under the pear trees
at night and call her again and again, and each time the Answer comes
nearer and nearer and I wait until at last one night, the supreme night
of all, she--she----"

Suddenly the tension broke. With a sharp cry and a violent uncertain
gesture of the hand Vanamee came to himself.

"Oh," he exclaimed, "what is it? Do I dare? What does it mean? There are
times when it appals me and there are times when it thrills me with
a sweetness and a happiness that I have not known since she died. The
vagueness of it! How can I explain it to you, this that happens when I
call to her across the night--that faint, far-off, unseen tremble in the
darkness, that intangible, scarcely perceptible stir. Something neither
heard nor seen, appealing to a sixth sense only. Listen, it is something
like this: On Quien Sabe, all last week, we have been seeding the earth.
The grain is there now under the earth buried in the dark, in the black
stillness, under the clods. Can you imagine the first--the very first
little quiver of life that the grain of wheat must feel after it is
sown, when it answers to the call of the sun, down there in the dark of
the earth, blind, deaf; the very first stir from the inert, long, long
before any physical change has occurred,--long before the microscope
could discover the slightest change,--when the shell first tightens with
the first faint premonition of life? Well, it is something as illusive
as that." He paused again, dreaming, lost in a reverie, then, just above
a whisper, murmured:

"'That which thou sowest is not quickened except it die,'... and she,
Angele... died."

"You could not have been mistaken?" said Presley. "You were sure that
there was something? Imagination can do so much and the influence of the
surroundings was strong. How impossible it would be that anything SHOULD
happen. And you say you heard nothing, saw nothing."

"I believe," answered Vanamee, "in a sixth sense, or, rather, a whole
system of other unnamed senses beyond the reach of our understanding.
People who live much alone and close to nature experience the sensation
of it. Perhaps it is something fundamental that we share with plants and
animals. The same thing that sends the birds south long before the first
colds, the same thing that makes the grain of wheat struggle up to meet
the sun. And this sense never deceives. You may see wrong, hear wrong,
but once touch this sixth sense and it acts