ing souls for
which no bodies have yet been made. But though he could not write, he
called thoughts, which he had once seen and let go, to come again to
him. He sent himself back along the road he had traveled beyond the
milestones. He searched by the wayside for beautiful memories he had
dropped there, and some of them he found grown up tall and white as
lilies in moonlight. Whatever he found was for Barbara.

On the third night after the revelation, he had gathered something to
give her, and strength enough to feel sure he would not put into his
letter the question which must not be asked: "What was the reason you
couldn't tell your husband that you loved him?"

Denin wrote with a typewriter, as he had written before, on blank paper
with no address, because it was better for Barbara to come in touch
with him only through his publishers. In that way, she would be spared
any sense of constraint she might have to feel in knowing that he lived
among her neighbors of long ago. She had given him her name frankly,
and she might fear some inadvertent mention of it to people she had met
as a child. If he were to be of real use to her, he thought, he must be
known only as a distant Voice, an Ear, a Sympathy, almost impersonal
outside his letters.

Denin wrote to her that he was sure, entirely sure, the man she loved
was "not too far away to know."

"You will only have to send him a thought, and it must reach him behind
that very thin wall we call death. The way I imagine it, such a message
goes where it's directed, just as when we call 'Central' through the
telephone. They, whom we speak of as dead, have their own work to do
and their own life to live, so perhaps they don't think of us every
moment. But surely we've only to call. They may not see us in the
flesh, any more than we can see them in the spirit; but it came to me
when I was very close to the other side, that our bodies don't enclose
us quite. We're half-open jewel-boxes, that let out flashes of emerald,
or sapphire, or diamond light, according to the strength of our
vibrations--or aspirations, if you like (I begin to realize that these
are much the same thing!). It is the flashes of light which are seen
and recognized by the ones who have passed farther on. The lights are
our images, as well as messages for them. But when I say 'farther on,'
it's only a figure of speech. They are not far off.

"We can see the rain. We can't see the wind, even when it is so clos