on't pretend not to know whom
you mean." He smiled in pity for my aberration, but he meant to be kind.
"A woman dead and buried!"

"She's buried, but she's not dead. She's dead for the world--she's dead
for me. But she's not dead for _you._"

"You hark back to the different construction we put on her appearance
that evening?"

"No," I answered, "I hark back to nothing. I've no need of it. I've more
than enough with what's before me."

"And pray, darling, what is that?"

"You're completely changed."

"By that absurdity?" he laughed.

"Not so much by that one as by other absurdities that have followed it."

"And what may they have been?"

We had faced each other fairly, with eyes that didn't flinch; but his
had a dim, strange light, and my certitude triumphed in his perceptible
paleness. "Do you really pretend," I asked, "not to know what they are?"

"My dear child," he replied, "you describe them too sketchily!"

I considered a moment. "One may well be embarrassed to finish the
picture! But from that point of view--and from the beginning--what was
ever more embarrassing than your idiosyncrasy?"

He was extremely vague. "My idiosyncrasy?"

"Your notorious, your peculiar power."

He gave a great shrug of impatience, a groan of overdone disdain. "Oh,
my peculiar power!"

"Your accessibility to forms of life," I coldly went on, "your command
of impressions, appearances, contacts closed--for our gain or our
loss--to the rest of us. That was originally a part of the deep interest
with which you inspired me--one of the reasons I was amused, I was
indeed positively proud to know you. It was a magnificent distinction;
it's a magnificent distinction still. But of course I had no prevision
then of the way it would operate now; and even had that been the case I
should have had none of the extraordinary way in which its action would
affect me."

"To what in the name of goodness," he pleadingly inquired, "are you
fantastically alluding?" Then as I remained silent, gathering a tone for
my charge, "How in the world _does_ it operate?" he went on; "and how in
the world are you affected?"

"She missed you for five years," I said, "but she never misses you now.
You're making it up!"

"Making it up?" He had begun to turn from white to red.

"You see her--you see her: you see her every night!" He gave a loud
sound of derision, but it was not a genuine one. "She comes to you as
she came that evening," I declared; "hav