d Anna Green and what she had told him of his
grandfather. How far away--how long ago that had been.... And yet, was
Anna Green far away now? Something of her had seemed always to be with
him on that long, weird voyage, from the infinite smallness and
pettiness of Earth to this realm out beyond the stars. And more than
ever now, somehow Lee seemed aware of her presence here in this quiet
room. Occultism? He had always told himself that surely he was no
mystic. A practical fellow, who could understand science when it was
taught him, but certainly never could give credence to mysticism. The
dead are dead, and the living are alive; and between them is a gulf--an
abyss of nothingness.

Now he found himself wondering. Were all those people on Earth who
claimed to feel the presence of dead loved ones near them? Were those
people just straining their fancy--just comforting themselves with what
they wished to believe? Or was the scoffer himself the fool? And if that
could be so, on Earth, why could not this strange realm be of such a
quality that an awareness of those who have passed from life would be
the normal thing? Who shall say that the mysteries of life and death are
unscientific? Was it not rather that they embraced those gaps of science
not yet understood? Mysteries which, if only we could understand them,
would be mysteries no longer?

Lee had left the table and again was standing at the latticed window,
beyond which the drowsing little garden lay silent, and empty now. The
guard who had been out here had moved further away; his figure was a
blob near a flowered thicket at the house corner. And suddenly Lee was
aware of another figure. There was a little splashing fountain near the
garden's center--a rill of water which came down a little embankment and
splashed into a pool where the rose light shimmered on the ripples.

The figure was sitting at the edge of the pool--a slim young girl in a
brief dress like a drape upon her. She sat, half reclining on the bank
by the shimmering water, with her long hair flowing down over her
shoulders and a lock of it trailing in the pool. For a moment he thought
that she was gazing into the water. Then as the light which tinted her
graceful form seemed to intensify, he saw that she was staring at him.

It seemed as though both of them, for that moment, were breathless with
a strange emotion awakened in them by the sight of each other. And then
slowly the girl rose to her feet. Sti