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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Miss Ludington's Sister, by Edward Bellamy
+#2 in our series by Edward Bellamy
+
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+Title: Miss Ludington's Sister
+
+Author: Edward Bellamy
+
+Release Date: November, 2004 [EBook #6903]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on February 10, 2003]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MISS LUDINGTON'S SISTER ***
+
+
+
+
+Text prepared by Malcolm Farmer.
+
+
+
+
+
+MISS LUDINGTON'S SISTER
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+
+The happiness of some lives is distributed pretty evenly over the whole
+stretch from the cradle to the grave, while that of others comes all at
+once, glorifying some particular epoch and leaving the rest in shadow.
+During one, five, or ten blithe years, as the case may be, all the
+springs of life send up sweet waters; joy is in the very air we breathe;
+happiness seems our native element. During this period we know what is
+the zest of living, as compared with the mere endurance of existence,
+which is, perhaps, the most we have attained to before or since. With men
+this culminating epoch comes often in manhood, or even at maturity,
+especially with men of arduous and successful careers. But with women it
+comes most frequently perhaps in girlhood and young womanhood.
+Particularly is this wont to be the fact with women who do not marry, and
+with whom, as the years glide on, life becomes lonelier and its interests
+fewer.
+
+By the time Miss Ida Ludington was twenty-five years old she recognised
+that she had done with happiness, and that the pale pleasures of memory
+were all which remained to her.
+
+It was not so much the mere fact that her youth was past, saddening
+though that might be, which had so embittered her life, but the
+peculiarly cruel manner in which it had been taken from her.
+
+The Ludingtons were one of the old families of Hilton, a little farming
+village among the hills of Massachusetts. They were not rich, but were
+well-to-do, lived in the largest house in the place, and were regarded
+somewhat as local magnates. Miss Ludington's childhood had been an
+exceptionally happy one, and as a girl she had been the belle of the
+village. Her beauty, together, with her social position and amiability of
+disposition, made her the idol of the young men, recognised leader of the
+girls, and the animating and central figure in the social life of the
+place.
+
+She was about twenty years old, at the height of her beauty and in the
+full tide of youthful enjoyment, when she fell ill of a dreadful disease,
+and for a long time lay between life and death. Or, to state the ease
+more accurately, the girl did die--it was a sad and faded woman who rose
+from that bed of sickness.
+
+The ravages of disease had not left a vestige of her beauty--it was
+hopelessly gone. The luxuriant, shining hair had fallen out and been
+replaced by a scanty growth of washed-out hue; the lips, but yesterday so
+full, and red, and tempting, were thin, and drawn, and colourless, and
+the rose-leaf complexion had given place to an aspect so cruelly pitted,
+seamed, and scarred that even friends did not recognize her.
+
+The fading of youth is always a melancholy experience with women; but in
+most cases the process is so gradual as to temper the poignancy of
+regret, and perhaps often to prevent its being experienced at all except
+as a vague sentiment.
+
+But in Miss Ludington's case the transition had been piteously sharp and
+abrupt.
+
+With others, ere youth is fully past its charms are well-nigh forgotten
+in the engrossments of later years; but with her there had been nothing
+to temper the bitterness of her loss.
+
+During the long period of invalidism which followed her sickness her only
+solace was a miniature of herself, at the age of seventeen, painted on
+ivory, the daguerrotype process not having come into use at this time,
+which was toward the close of the third decade of the present century.
+
+Over this picture she brooded hours together when no one was near,
+studying the bonny, gladsome face through blinding tears, and sometimes
+murmuring incoherent words of tenderness.
+
+Her young friends occasionally came to sit with her, by way of enlivening
+the weary hours of an invalid's day. At such times she would listen with
+patient indifference while they sought to interest her with current local
+gossip, and as soon as possible would turn the conversation back to the
+old happy days before her sickness. On this topic she was never weary of
+talking, but it was impossible to induce her to take any interest in the
+present.
+
+She had caused a locket to be made, to contain the ivory miniature of
+herself as a girl, and always wore it on her bosom.
+
+In no way could her visitors give her more pleasure than by asking to see
+this picture, and expressing their admiration of it. Then her poor,
+disfigured face would look actually happy, and she would exclaim, "Was
+she not beautiful?" "I do not think it flattered her, do you?" and with
+other similar expressions indicate her sympathy with the admiration
+expressed. The absence of anything like self-consciousness in the delight
+she took in these tributes to the charms of her girlish self was pathetic
+in its completeness. It was indeed not as herself, but as another, that
+she thought of this fair girl, who had vanished from the earth, leaving a
+picture as her sole memento. How, indeed, could it be otherwise when she
+looked from the picture to the looking-glass, and contrasted the images?
+She mourned for her girlish self, which had been so cruelly effaced from
+the world of life, as for a person, near and precious to her beyond the
+power of words to express, who had died.
+
+From the time that she had first risen from the sick-bed, where she had
+suffered so sad a transformation, nothing could induce her to put on the
+brightly coloured gowns, beribboned, and ruffled, and gaily trimmed,
+which she had worn as a girl; and as soon as she was able she carefully
+folded and put them away in lavender, like relics of the dead. For
+herself, she dressed henceforth in drab or black.
+
+For three or four years she remained more or less an invalid. At the end
+of that time she regained a fair measure of health, although she seemed
+not likely ever to be strong.
+
+In the meanwhile her school-mates and friends had pretty much all
+married, or been given in marriage. She was a stranger to the new set of
+young people which had come on the stage since her day, while her former
+companions lived in a world of new interests, with which she had nothing
+in common. Society, in reorganizing itself, had left her on the outside.
+The present had moved on, leaving her behind with the past. She asked
+nothing better. If she was nothing to the present, the present was still
+less to her. As to society, her sensitiveness to the unpleasant
+impression made by her personal appearance rendered social gatherings
+distasteful to her, and she wore a heavy veil when she went to church.
+
+She was an only child. Her mother had long been dead, and when about this
+time her father died she was left without near kin. With no ties of
+contemporary interest to hold her to the present she fell more and more
+under the influence of the habit of retrospection.
+
+The only brightness of colour which life could ever have for her lay
+behind in the girlhood which had ended but yesterday, and was yet so
+completely ended. She found her only happiness in the recollections of
+that period which she retained. These were the only goods she prized, and
+it was the grief of her life that, while she had strong boxes for her
+money, and locks and keys for her silver and her linen, there was no
+device whereby she could protect her store of memories from the slow
+wasting of forgetfulness.
+
+She lived with a servant quite alone in the old Ludington homestead,
+which it was her absorbing care to keep in precisely the same condition,
+even to the arrangement of the furniture, in which it had always been.
+
+If she could have insured the same permanence in the village of Hilton,
+outside the homestead enclosure, she would have been spared the cause of
+her keenest unhappiness. For the hand of change was making havoc with the
+village: the railroad had come, shops had been built, and stores and new
+houses were going up on every side, and the beautiful hamlet, with its
+score or two of old-fashioned dwellings, which had been the scene of her
+girlhood, was in a fair way to be transformed into a vile manufacturing
+village.
+
+Miss Ludington, to whom every stick and stone of the place was dear,
+could not walk abroad without missing some ancient landmark removed since
+she had passed that way before, perhaps a tree felled, some meadow, that
+had been a playground of her childhood, dug up for building-lots, or a
+row of brick tenements going up on the site of a sacred grove.
+
+Her neighbours generally had succumbed to the rage for improvement, as
+they called it. There was a general remodelling and modernizing of
+houses, and, where nothing more expensive could be afforded, the
+paint-brush wrought its cheap metamorphosis. "You wouldn't know Hilton
+was the same place," was the complacent verdict of her neighbours, to
+which Miss Ludington sorrowfully assented.
+
+It would be hard to describe her impotent wrath, her sense of outrage and
+irreparable loss, as one by one these changes effaced some souvenir of
+her early life. The past was once dead already; they were killing it a
+second time. Her feelings at length became so intolerable that she kept
+her house, pretty much ceasing to walk abroad.
+
+At this period, when she was between thirty and thirty-five years old, a
+distant relative left her a large fortune. She had been well-to-do
+before, but now she was very rich. As her expenses had never exceeded a
+few hundred dollars a year, which had procured her everything she needed,
+it would be hard to imagine a person with less apparent use for a great
+deal of money. And yet no young rake, in the heyday of youth and the riot
+of hot blood, could have been more overjoyed at the falling to him of a
+fortune than was this sad-faced old maid. She became smiling and
+animated. She no longer kept at home, but walked abroad. Her step was
+quick and strong; she looked on at the tree-choppers, the builders, and
+the painters, at their nefarious work, no more in helpless grief and
+indignation, but with an unmistakable expression of triumph.
+
+Presently surveyors appeared in the village, taking exact and careful
+measurements of the single broad and grassy street which formed the older
+part of it. Miss Ludington was closeted with a builder, and engrossed
+with estimates. The next year she left Hilton to the mercy of the
+vandals, and never returned.
+
+But it was to another Hilton that she went.
+
+The fortune she had inherited had enabled her to carry out a design which
+had been a day-dream with her ever since the transformation of the
+village had begun. Among the pieces of property left her was a large farm
+on Long Island several miles out of the city of Brooklyn. Here she had
+rebuilt the Hilton of her girlhood, in facsimile, with every change
+restored, every landmark replaced. In the midst of this silent village
+she had built for her residence an exact duplicate of the Ludington
+homestead, situated in respect to the rest of the village precisely as
+the original was situated in the real Hilton.
+
+The astonishment of the surveyors and builders at the character of the
+work required of them was probably great, and their bills certainly were,
+though Miss Ludington would not have grudged the money had they been ten
+times greater. However, seeing that the part of the village duplicated
+consisted of but one broad maple-planted street, with not over thirty
+houses, mostly a story and a half, and that none of the buildings, except
+the school-house, the little meeting-house, and the homestead, were
+finished inside, the outlay was not greater than an elaborate plan of
+landscape gardening would have involved.
+
+The furniture and fittings of the Massachusetts homestead, to the least
+detail, had been used to fit up its Long Island duplicate, and when all
+was complete and Miss Ludington had settled down to housekeeping, she
+felt more at home than in ten years past.
+
+True, the village which she had restored was empty; but it was not more
+empty than the other Hilton had been to her these many years, since her
+old schoolmates had been metamorphosed into staid fathers and mothers.
+These respectable persons were not the schoolmates and friends of her
+girlhood, and with no hard feelings toward them, she had still rather
+resented seeing them about, as tending to blur her recollections of their
+former selves, in whom alone she was interested.
+
+That her new Long Island neighbours considered her mildly insane was to
+her the least of all concerns. The only neighbours she cared about were
+the shadowy forms which peopled the village she had rescued from
+oblivion, whose faces she fancied smiling gratefully at her from the
+windows of the homes she had restored to them.
+
+For she had a notion that the spirits of her old neighbours, long dead,
+had found out this resurrected Hilton, and were grateful for the
+opportunity to revisit the unaltered scenes of their passion. If she had
+grieved over the removal of the old landmarks and the change in the
+appearance of the village, how much more hopelessly must they have
+grieved if indeed the dead revisit earth! The living, if their homes are
+broken up, can make them new ones, which, after a fashion, will serve the
+purpose; but the dead cannot. They are thenceforth homeless and desolate.
+
+No sense of having benefited living persons would have afforded Miss
+Ludington the pleasure she took in feeling that, by rebuilding ancient
+Hilton, she had restored homes to these homeless ones.
+
+But of all this fabric of the past which she had resurrected, the central
+figure was the school-girl Ida Ludington. The restored village was the
+mausoleum of her youth.
+
+Over the great old-fashioned fireplace, in the sitting-room of the
+homestead which she had rebuilt in the midst of the village, she had hung
+a portrait in oil, by the first portrait-painter then in the country. It
+was an enlarged copy of the little likeness on ivory which had formerly
+been so great a solace to her.
+
+The portrait was executed with extremely life-like effect, and was fondly
+believed by Miss Ludington to be a more accurate likeness in some
+particulars than the ivory picture itself.
+
+It represented a very beautiful girl of seventeen or eighteen, although
+already possessing the ripened charms of a woman. She was dressed in
+white, with a low bodice, her luxuriant golden hair, of a rare sheen and
+fineness, falling upon beautifully moulded shoulders. The complexion was
+of a purity that needed the faint tinge of pink in the cheeks to relieve
+it of a suspicion of pallor. The eyes were of the deepest, tenderest
+violet, full of the light of youth, and the lips were smiling.
+
+It was, indeed, no wonder that Miss Ludington had mourned the vanishing
+from earth of this delectable maiden with exceeding bitterness, or that
+her heart yet yearned after her with an aching tenderness across the gulf
+of years.
+
+How bright, how vivid, how glowing had been the life of that beautiful
+girl! How real as compared with her own faint and faded personality,
+which, indeed, had shone these many years only by the light reflected
+from that young face! And yet that life, in its strength and brightness,
+had vanished like an exhalation, and its elements might no more be
+recombined than the hues of yesterday's dawn.
+
+Miss Ludington had hung the portraits of her father and mother with
+immortelles, but the frame of the girl's picture she had wound with
+deepest crape.
+
+Her father and mother she did not mourn as one without hope, believing
+that she should see them some day in another world; but from the death of
+change which the girl had died no Messiah had ever promised any
+resurrection.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+
+The solitude in which Miss Ludington lived had become, through habit, so
+endeared to her that when, a few years after she had been settled in her
+ghostly village, a cousin died in poverty, bequeathing to her with his
+last breath a motherless infant boy, it was with great reluctance that
+she accepted the charge. She would have willingly assumed the support of
+the child, but if it had been possible would have greatly preferred
+providing for him elsewhere to bringing him home with her. This, however,
+was impracticable, and so there came to be a baby in the old maid's
+house.
+
+Little Paul De Riemer was two years old when he was brought to live with
+Miss Ludington--a beautiful child, with loving ways, and deep, dark,
+thoughtful eyes. When he was first taken into the sitting-room, the
+picture of the smiling girl over the fireplace instantly attracted his
+gaze, and, putting out his arms, he cooed to it. This completed the
+conquest of Miss Ludington, whose womanly heart had gone out to the
+winsome child at first sight.
+
+As the boy grew older his first rational questions were about the pretty
+lady in the picture, and, he was never so happy as when Miss Ludington
+took him upon her knee and told him stories about her for hours together.
+
+These stories she always related in the third person, for it would only
+puzzle and grieve the child to intimate to him that there was anything in
+common between the radiant girl he had been taught to call Ida and the
+withered woman whom he called Aunty. What, indeed, had they in common but
+their name? and it had been so long since any one had called her Ida,
+that Miss Ludington scarcely felt that the name belonged to her present
+self at all.
+
+In their daily walks about the village she would tell the little boy
+endless stories about incidents which had befallen Ida at this spot or
+that. She was never weary of telling, or he of listening to, these tales,
+and it was wonderful how the artless sympathy of the child comforted the
+lone woman.
+
+One day, when he was eight years old, finding himself alone in the
+sitting-room, the lad, after contemplating Ida's picture for a long time,
+piled one chair on another, and climbing upon the structure, put up his
+chubby lips to the painted lips of the portrait and kissed them with
+right good-will. Just then Miss Ludington came in, and saw what he was
+doing. Seizing him in her arms, she cried over him and kissed him till he
+was thoroughly frightened.
+
+A year or two later, on his announcing one day his intention to marry Ida
+when he grew up, Miss Ludington explained to him that she was dead. He
+was quite overcome with grief at this intelligence, and for a long time
+refused to be comforted.
+
+And so it was, that never straying beyond the confines of the eerie
+village, and having no companion but Miss Ludington, the boy fell
+scarcely less than she under the influence of the beautiful girl who was
+the presiding genius of the place.
+
+As he grew older, far from losing its charm, Ida's picture laid upon him
+a new spell. Her violet eyes lighted his first love-dreams. She became
+his ideal of feminine loveliness, drawing to herself, as the sun draws
+mist, all the sentiment and dawning passion of the youth. In a word, he
+fell in love with her.
+
+Of course he knew now who she had been. Long before as soon as he was old
+enough to understand it, this had been explained to him. But though he
+was well aware that neither on earth nor in heaven, nor anywhere in the
+universe, did she any more exist, that knowledge was quite without effect
+upon the devotion which she had inspired. The matter indeed, presented
+itself in a very simple way to his mind. "If I had never seen her
+picture," he said one day to Miss Ludington, "I should never have known
+that my love was dead, and I should have gone seeking her through all the
+world, and wondering what was the reason I could not find her."
+
+Miss Ludington was over sixty years of age and Paul was twenty-two when
+he finished his course at college. She had naturally supposed that, on
+going out into the world, mixing with young men and meeting young women,
+he would outgrow his romantic fancy concerning Ida; but the event was
+very different. As year after year he returned home to spend his
+vacations, it was evident that his visionary passion was strengthening
+rather than losing its hold upon him.
+
+But the strangest thing of all was the very peculiar manner in which,
+during the last vacation preceding his graduation, he began to allude to
+Ida in his conversations with Miss Ludington. It was, indeed, so peculiar
+that when, after his return to college, she recalled the impression left
+upon her mind, she was constrained to think that she had, somehow,
+totally misunderstood him; for he had certainly seemed to talk as if Ida,
+instead of being that most utterly, pathetically dead of all dead
+things--the past self of a living person--were possibly not dead at all:
+as if, in fact she might have a spiritual existence, like that ascribed
+to the souls of those other dead whose bodies are laid in the grave.
+
+Decidedly, she must have misunderstood him.
+
+Some months later, on one of the last days of June, he graduated. Miss
+Ludington. would have attended the graduation exercises but for the fact
+that her long seclusion from society made the idea of going away from
+home and mingling with strangers intolerable. She had expected him home
+the morning after his graduation. When, however, she came downstairs,
+expecting to greet him at the breakfast-table, she found instead a letter
+from him, which, to her further astonishment, consisted of several
+closely written sheets. What could have possessed him to write her this
+laborious letter on the very day of his return?
+
+The letter began by telling her that he had accepted an invitation from a
+class-mate, and should not be home for a couple of days. "But this is
+only an excuse," he went on; "the true reason that I do not at once
+return is that you may have a day or two to think over the contents of
+this letter before you see me; for what I have to say will seem very
+startling to you at first. I was trying to prepare you for it when I
+talked, as you evidently thought, so strangely, about Ida, the last time
+I was at home; but you were only mystified, and I was not ready to
+explain. A certain timidity held me back. It was so great a matter that I
+was afraid to broach it by word of mouth lest I might fail to put it in
+just the best way before your mind, and its strangeness might terrify you
+before you could be led to consider its reasonableness. But, now that I
+am coming home to stay, I should not be able to keep it from you, and it
+has seemed to me better to write you in this way, so that you may have
+time fully to debate the matter with your own heart before you see me. Do
+you remember the last evening that I was at home, my asking you if you
+did not sometimes have a sense of Ida's presence? You looked at me as if
+you thought I were losing my wits. What did I mean, you asked, by
+speaking of her as a living person? But I was not ready to speak, and I
+put you off.
+
+"I am going to answer your question now. I am going to tell you how and
+why I believe that she is neither lost nor dead, but a living and
+immortal spirit. For this, nothing less than this, is my absolute
+assurance, the conviction which I ask you to share.
+
+"But stop, let us go back. Let us assume nothing. Let us reason it all
+out carefully from the beginning. Let me forget that I am her lover. Let
+me be stiff; and slow, and formal as a logician, while I prove that my
+darling lives for ever. And you, follow me carefully, to see if I slip.
+Forget what ineffable thing she is to you; forget what it is to you that
+she lives. Do not let your eyes fill; do not let your brain swim. It
+would be madness to believe it if it is not true. Listen, then:--
+You know that men speak of human beings, taken singly, as individuals.
+It is taken for granted in the common speech that the individual is the
+unit of humanity, not to be subdivided. That is, indeed, what the
+etymology of the word means. Nevertheless, the slightest reflection will
+cause any one to see that this assumption is a most mistaken one. The
+individual is no more the unit of humanity than is the tribe or family;
+but, like them, is a collective noun, and stands for a number of distinct
+persons, related one to another in a particular way, and having certain
+features of resemblance. The persons composing a family are related both
+collaterally and by succession or descent, while the persons composing an
+individual are related by succession only. They are called infancy,
+childhood, youth, manhood, maturity, age, and dotage.
+
+"These persons are very unlike one another. Striking physical, mental,
+and moral differences exist between them. Infancy and childhood are
+incomprehensible to manhood, and manhood not less so to them. The youth
+looks forward with disgust to the old age which is to follow him, and the
+old man has far more in common with other old men, his own
+contemporaries, than with the youth who preceded him. How frequently do
+we see the youth vicious and depraved, and the man who follows him
+upright and virtuous, hating iniquity! How often, on the other hand, is a
+pure and innocent girlhood succeeded by a dissolute and shameless
+womanhood! In many cases age looks back upon youth with inexpressible
+longing and tenderness, and quite as often with shame and remorse; but in
+all cases with the same consciousness of profound contrast, and of a
+great gulf fixed between.
+
+"If the series of persons which constitutes an individual could by any
+magic be brought together and these persons confronted with one another,
+in how many cases would the result be mutual misunderstanding, disgust,
+and even animosity? Suppose, for instance, that Saul, the persecutor of
+the disciples of Jesus, who held the garments of them that stoned
+Stephen, should be confronted with his later self, Paul the apostle,
+would there not be reason to anticipate a stormy interview? For there is
+no more ground to suppose that Saul would be converted to Paul's view
+than the reverse. Each was fully persuaded in his own mind as to what he
+did.
+
+"But for the fact that each one of the persons who together constitute an
+individual is well off the field before his successor comes upon it, we
+should not infrequently see the man collaring his own youth, handing him
+over to the authorities, and prefering charges against him as a rascally
+fellow.
+
+"Not by any means are the successive persons of an individual always thus
+out of harmony with one another. In many, perhaps in a majority, of
+cases, the same general principles and ideals are recognized by the man
+which were adopted by the boy, and as much sympathy exists between them
+as is possible in view of the different aspects which the world
+necessarily presents to youth and age. In such cases, no doubt, could the
+series of persons constituting the individual be brought together, a
+scene of inexpressibly tender and intimate communion would ensue.
+
+"But, though no magic may bring back our past selves to earth, may we not
+hope to meet them hereafter in some other world? Nay, must we not expect
+so to meet them if we believe in the immortality of human souls? For if
+our past selves, who were dead before we were alive, had no souls, then
+why suppose our present selves have any? Childhood, youth, and manhood
+are the sweetest, the fairest, the noblest, the strongest of the persons
+who together constitute an individual. Are they soulless? Do they go down
+in darkness to oblivion while immortality is reserved for the withered
+soul of age? If we must believe that there is but one soul to all the
+persons of an individual it would be easier to believe that it belongs to
+youth or manhood, and that age is soulless. For if youth, strong-winged
+and ardent, full of fire and power, perish, leaving nothing behind save a
+few traces in the memory, how shall the flickering spirit of age have
+strength to survive the blast of death?
+
+"The individual, in its career of seventy years, has not one body, but
+many, each wholly new. It is a commonplace of physiology that there is
+not a particle in the body to-day that was in it a few years ago. Shall
+we say that none of these bodies has a soul except the last, merely
+because the last decays more suddenly than the others?
+
+"Or is it maintained that, although there is such utter diversity--physical,
+mental, moral--between infancy and manhood, youth and age, nevertheless,
+there is a certain essence common to them all, and persisting unchanged
+through them all, and that this is the soul of the individual? But such
+an essence as should be the same in the babe and the man, the youth and
+the dotard, could be nothing more than a colourless abstraction, without
+distinctive qualities of any kind--a mere principle of life like the
+fabled jelly protoplasm. Such a fancy reduces the hope of immortality to
+an absurdity.
+
+"No! no! It is not any such grotesque or fragmentary immortality that God
+has given us. The Creator does not administer the universe on so
+niggardly a plan. Either there is no immortality for us which is
+intelligible or satisfying, or childhood, youth, manhood, age, and all
+the other persons who make up an individual, live for ever, and one day
+will meet and be together in God's eternal present; and when the several
+souls of an individual are in harmony no doubt He will perfect their
+felicity by joining them with a tie that shall be incomparably more
+tender and intimate than any earthly union ever dreamed of, constituting
+a life one yet manifold--a harp of many strings, not struck successively
+as here on earth, but blending in rich accord.
+
+"And now I beg you not to suppose that what I have tried to demonstrate
+is any hasty or ill-considered fancy. It was, indeed, at first but a
+dream with which the eyes of my sweet mistress inspired me, but from a
+dream it has grown into a belief, and in these last months into a
+conviction which I am sure nothing can shake. If you can share it the
+long mourning of your life will be at an end. Per my own part I could
+never return to the old way of thinking without relapsing into
+unutterable despair. To do so would be virtually to give up faith in any
+immortality at all worth speaking of. For it is the long procession of
+our past selves, each with its own peculiar charm and incommunicable
+quality, slipping away from us as we pass on, and not the last self of
+all whom the grave entraps, which constitutes our chief contribution to
+mortality. What shall it avail for the grave to give up its handful if
+there be no immortality for this great multitude? God would not mock us
+thus. He has power not only over the grave, but over the viewless
+sepulchre of the past, and not one of the souls to which he has ever
+given life will be found wanting on the day when he makes up his jewels."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+
+To understand the impression which Paul's letter produced upon Miss
+Ludington imagine, in the days before the resurrection of the dead was
+preached, with what effect the convincing announcement of that doctrine
+would have fallen on the ears of one who had devoted her life to hopeless
+regrets over the ashes of a friend.
+
+And yet at no time have men been wholly without belief in some form of
+survival beyond the grave, and such a bereaved woman of antiquity would
+merely have received a more clear and positive assurance of what she had
+vaguely imagined before. But that there was any resurrection for her
+former self--that the bright youth which she had so yearned after and
+lamented could anywhere still exist, in a mode however shadowy, Miss
+Ludington had never so much as dreamed.
+
+There might be immortality for all things else; the birds and beasts, and
+even the lowest forms of life, might, under some form, in some world,
+live again; but no priest had ever promised, nor any poet ever dreamed,
+that the title of a man's past selves to a life immortal is as
+indefeasible as that of his present self.
+
+It did not occur to her to doubt, to quibble, or to question, concerning
+the grounds of this great hope. From the first moment that she
+comprehended the purport of Paul's argument, she had accepted its
+conclusion as an indubitable revelation, and only wondered that she had
+never thought of it herself, so natural, so inevitable, so
+incontrovertible did it seem.
+
+And as a sunburst in an instant transforms the sad fields of November
+into a bright and cheerful landscape, so did this revelation suddenly
+illumine her sombre life.
+
+All day she went about the house and the village like one in a dream,
+smiling and weeping, and reading Paul's letter over and over, through
+eyes swimming with a joy unutterable.
+
+In the afternoon, with tender, tremulous fingers, she removed the crape
+from the frame of Ida's picture, which it had draped for so many years.
+As she was performing this symbolic act, it seemed to the old lady that
+the fair young face smiled upon her. "Forgive me!" she murmured. "How
+could I have ever thought you dead!"
+
+It was not till evening that her servants reminded her that she had not
+eaten that day, and induced her to take food.
+
+The next afternoon Paul arrived. He had not been without very serious
+doubt as to the manner in which his argument for the immortality of past
+selves might impress Miss Ludington. A mild melancholy such as hers
+sometimes becomes sweet by long indulgence. She might not welcome
+opinions which revolutionized the fixed ideas of her life, even though
+they should promise a more cheerful philosophy. If she did not accept his
+belief, but found it chimerical and visionary, the effect of its
+announcement upon her mind could only be unpleasantly disturbing. It was,
+therefore, not without some anxiety that he approached the house.
+
+But his first glimpse of her, as she stood in the door awaiting him,
+dissipated his apprehensions. She wore a smiling face, and the deep black
+in which she always dressed was set off, for the first time since his
+knowledge of her, with a bit or two of bright colour.
+
+She said not a word, but, taking him by the hand, led him into the
+sitting-room.
+
+That morning she had sent into Brooklyn for immortelles, and had spent
+the day in festooning them about Ida's picture, so that now the sweet
+girlish face seemed smiling upon them out of a veritable bower of the
+white flowers of immortality.
+
+In the days that followed, Miss Ludington seemed a changed woman, such
+blitheness did the new faith she had found bring into her life. The
+conviction that the past was deathless, and her bright girlhood immortal,
+took all the melancholy out of retrospection. Nay, more than that, it
+turned retrospection into anticipation. She no longer viewed her
+youth-time through the pensive haze of memory, but the rosy mist of hope.
+She should see it again, for was it not safe with God? Her pains to guard
+the memory of the beautiful past, to preserve it from the second death of
+forgetfulness, were now all needless; she could trust it with God, to be
+restored to her in his eternal present, its lustre undimmed, and no trait
+missing.
+
+The laying aside of her mourning garb was but one indication of the
+change that had come over her.
+
+The whole household, from scullion to coachman, caught the inspiration of
+her brighter mood. The servants laughed aloud about the house. The
+children of the gardener, ever before banished to other parts of the
+grounds, played unrebuked in the sacred street of the silent village.
+
+As for Paul, since the revelation had come to him that the lady of his
+love was no mere dream of a life for ever vanished, but was herself alive
+for evermore, and that he should one day meet her, his love had assumed a
+colour and a reality it had never possessed before. To him this meant all
+it would have meant to the lover of a material maiden, to be admitted to
+her immediate society.
+
+The sense of her presence in the village imparted to the very air a fine
+quality of intoxication. The place was her shrine, and he lived in it as
+in a sanctuary.
+
+It was not as if he should have to wait many years, till death, before he
+should see her. As soon as he gave place to the later self which was to
+succeed him, he should be with her. Already his boyish self had no doubt
+greeted her, and she had taken in her arms the baby Paul who had held his
+little arms out to her picture twenty years before.
+
+To be in love with the spirit of a girl, however beautiful she might have
+been when on earth, would doubtless seem to most young men a very
+chimerical sort of passion; but Paul, on the other hand, looked upon the
+species of attraction which they called love as scarcely more than a
+gross appetite. During his absence from home he had seen no woman's face
+that for a moment rivalled Ida's portrait. Shy and fastidious, he had
+found no pleasure in ladies' society, and had listened to his classmates'
+talk of flirtations and conquests with secret contempt. What did they
+know of love? What had their coarse and sensuous ideas in common with the
+rare and delicate passion to which his heart was dedicated--a love asking
+and hoping for no reward, but sufficient to itself?
+
+He had spent but a few weeks at home when Miss Ludington began to talk
+quite seriously to him about studying for some profession. He was rather
+surprised at this, for he had supposed she would be glad to have him at
+home, for a while at lease, now that he had done with college. To Paul,
+at this time, the idea of any pursuit which would take him away from the
+village was extremely distasteful, and he had no difficulty in finding
+excuses enough for procrastinating a step for which, indeed, no sort of
+urgency could be pretended.
+
+He was to be Miss Ludington's heir, and any profession which he might
+adopt would be purely ornamental at most.
+
+Finding that he showed no disposition to consider a profession she
+dropped that point and proposed that he should take six months of foreign
+travel, as a sort of rounding off of his college course. To the
+advantages of this project he was, however, equally insensible. When she
+urged it on him, he said, "Why, aunty, one would say you were anxious to
+get rid of me. Don't we get on well together? Have you taken a dislike to
+me? I'm sure I'm very comfortable here. I don't want to do anything
+different, or to go off anywhere. Why won't you let me stay with you?"
+
+And so she had to let the matter drop.
+
+The truth was she had become anxious to get him away; but it was on his
+account, not hers.
+
+In putting his room to rights one day since his return from college she
+had come upon a scrap of paper containing some verses addressed "To Ida."
+Paul had rather a pretty knack at turning rhymes, and the tears came to
+Miss Ludington's eyes as she read these lines. They were an attempt at a
+love sonnet, throbbing with passion, and yet so mystical in some of the
+allusions that nothing but her knowledge of Paul's devotion to Ida would
+have given her a clue to his meaning. She was filled with apprehension as
+she considered the effect which this infatuation, if it should continue
+to gain strength, might have upon one of Paul's dreamy temperament and
+excessive ideality. That she had devoted her own lonely and useless life
+to the cult of the past did not greatly matter, although in the light of
+her present happier faith she saw and regretted her mistake; but as for
+permitting Paul's life to be overshadowed by the same influence she could
+not consent to it. Something must be done to get him away from home, or
+at least to divert the current of his thought. The failure of her efforts
+to induce him to consider any scheme that involved his leaving the
+village threw her into a state of great uneasiness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+
+At about this time it chanced that Miss Ludington drove into Brooklyn one
+morning to do some shopping. She was standing at a counter in a large
+store, examining goods, when she became aware that a lady standing at
+another counter was attentively regarding her. The lady in question was
+of about her own height and age, her hair being nearly white, like Miss
+Ludington's; but it was evident from the hard lines of her face and her
+almost shabby dress that life had by no means gone so easily with her as
+with the lady she was regarding so curiously.
+
+As Miss Ludington looked up she smiled, and, crossing the store, held out
+her hand. "Ida Ludington! don't you know me?" Miss Ludington scanned her
+face a moment, and then, clasping her outstretched hand, exclaimed,
+delightedly, "Why, Sarah Cobb, where did you come from?" and for the next
+quarter of an hour the two ladies, quite oblivious of the clerks who were
+waiting on them, and the customers who were jostling them, stood absorbed
+in the most animated conversation. They had been school-girls together in
+Hilton forty-five years before, and, not having met since Miss
+Ludington's removal from the village, had naturally a great deal to say.
+
+"It is thirty years since I have seen any one from Hilton," said Miss
+Ludington at last, "and I'm not going to let you escape me. You must come
+out with me to my house and stay overnight, and we will talk old times
+over. I would not have missed you for anything."
+
+Sarah Cobb, who had said that her name was now Mrs. Slater, and that she
+lived in New York, having removed there from Hilton only a few years
+previous, seemed nothing loth to accept her friend's invitation, and it
+was arranged that Miss Ludington should send her carriage to meet her at
+one of the Brooklyn ferries the day following. Miss Ludington wanted to
+send the carriage to Mrs. Slater's residence in New York, but the latter
+said that it would be quite as convenient for her to take it at the
+ferry.
+
+After repeated injunctions not to fail of her appointment, Miss Ludington
+finally bade her old school-mate good-by and drove home in a state of
+pleased expectancy.
+
+She entertained Paul at the tea-table with an account of her adventure,
+and gave him an animated history of the Cobb family in general and Sarah
+in particular. She had known Sarah ever since they both could walk, and
+during the latter part of their school life they had been inseparable.
+The scholars had even christened them "The Twins," because they were so
+much together and looked so much alike. Their secrets were always joint
+property.
+
+The next afternoon Miss Ludington went herself in the carriage to fetch
+her friend from the ferry. She wanted to be with her and enjoy her
+surprise when she first saw the restored Hilton on entering the grounds.
+In this respect her anticipations were fully justified.
+
+The arrangement of the grounds was such that a high board fence protected
+the interior from inquisitive passers-by on the highway, and the gate was
+set in a corner, so that no considerable part of the enclosure was
+visible from it. The gravelled driveway, immediately after entering the
+grounds, took a sharp turn round the corner of the gardener's cottage,
+which answered for a gatekeeper's lodge. The moment, however, it was out
+of sight from the highway it became transformed into a country road, with
+wide, grassy borders and footpaths close to the rail fences, while just
+ahead lay the silent village, with the small, brown, one-storey,
+one-roomed school-house on one side of the green, and the little white
+box of a meeting-house, with its gilt weathercock, on the other.
+
+As this scene burst upon Mrs. Slater's view, her bewilderment was amusing
+to witness. Her appearance for a moment was really as if she believed
+herself the victim of some sort of magic, and suspected her friend of
+being a sorceress. Reassured on this point by Miss Ludington's smiling
+explanation, her astonishment gave place to the liveliest interest and
+curiosity. The carriage was forthwith stopped and sent around to the
+stables, while the two friends went on foot through the village. Every
+house, every fence-corner, every lilac-bush or clump of hollyhocks, or
+row of currant-bushes in the gardens, suggested some reminiscence, and
+the two old ladies were presently laughing and crying at once. At every
+dwelling they lingered long, and went on reluctantly with many backward
+glances, and all their speech was but a repetition of, "Don't you
+remember this?" and "Do you remember that?"
+
+Mrs Slater, having left Hilton but recently, was able to explain just
+what had been removed, replaced, or altered subsequent to Miss
+Ludington's flight. The general appearance of the old street, Mrs. Slater
+said, remained much the same, despite the changes which had driven Miss
+Ludington away; but new streets had been opened up, and the population of
+the village had trebled, and become largely foreign.
+
+In their slow progress they came at last to the school-house.
+
+The door was ajar, and they entered on tiptoe, like tardy scholars. With
+a glance of mutual intelligence they hung their hats, each on the one of
+the row of wooden pegs in the entry, which had been hers as a
+school-girl, and through the open door entered the silent school-room and
+sat down in the self-same seats in which two maidens, so unlike them, yet
+linked to them by so strangely tender a tie, had reigned as school-room
+belles nearly half a century before. In hushed voices, with moist eyes;
+and faces shining with the light of other days, those grey-haired women
+talked together of the scenes which that homely old room had witnessed,
+the long-silent laughter, and the voices, no more heard on earth, with
+which it had once echoed.
+
+There in the corner stood a great wrought-iron stove, the counterpart of
+the one around whose red-hot sides they had shivered, in their short
+dresses, on cold winter mornings. On the walls hung the quaint maps of
+that period whence they had received geographical impressions, strangely
+antiquated now. Along one side of the room ran a black-board, on which
+they had been wont to demonstrate their ignorance of algebra and geometry
+to the complete satisfaction of the master, while behind them as they sat
+was a row of recitation benches, associated with so many a trying ordeal
+of school-girl existence.
+
+"Do you ever think where the girls are in whose seats we are sitting?"
+said Mrs. Slater, musingly. "I can remember myself as a girl, more or
+less distinctly, and can even be sentimental about her; but it doesn't
+seem to me that I am the same person at all; I can't realize it."
+
+"Of course you can't realize it. Why should you expect to realize what is
+not true?" replied Miss Ludington.
+
+"But I am the same person," responded Mrs. Slater.
+
+Miss Ludington regarded her with a smile.
+
+"You have kept your looks remarkably, my dear," she said. "You did not
+lose them all at once, as I did; but isn't it a little audacious to try
+to pass yourself off as a school-girl of seventeen?"
+
+Mrs. Slater laughed. "But I once was she, if I am not now," she said.
+"You won't deny that."
+
+"I certainly shall deny it, with your permission," replied Ludington. "I
+remember her very well, and she was no more an old woman like you than
+you are a young girl like her."
+
+Mrs. Slater laughed again. "How sharp you are getting, my dear!" she
+said. "Since you are so close after me, I shall have to admit that I have
+changed slightly in appearance in the forty odd years since we went to
+school at Hilton, and I'll admit that my heart is even less like a girl's
+than my face; but, though I have changed so much, I am still the same
+person, I suppose."
+
+"Which do you mean?" inquired Miss Ludington. "You say in one breath that
+you are a changed person, and that you are the same person. If you are a
+changed person you can't be the same, and if you are the same you can't
+have changed."
+
+"I should really like to know what you are driving at," said Mrs. Slater,
+calmly. "It seems to me that we are disputing about words."
+
+"Oh, no, not about words! It is a great deal more than a question of
+words," exclaimed Miss Ludington. "You say that we old women and the
+girls who sat here forty years and more ago are the same persons,
+notwithstanding we are so completely transformed without and within. I
+say we are not the same, and thank God, for their sweet sakes, that we
+are not. Surely that is not a mere dispute about words."
+
+"But, if we are not those girls, then what has become of them?" asked
+Mrs. Slater.
+
+"You might better ask what had become of them if you had to seek them in
+us; but I will tell you what has become of them, Sarah. It is what will
+become of us when we, in our turn, vanish from earth, and the places that
+know us now shall know us no more. They are immortal with God, and we
+shall one day meet them over there."
+
+"What a very odd idea!" exclaimed Mrs. Slater, regarding her friend with
+astonishment.
+
+Miss Ludington flushed slightly as she replied, "I don't think it half so
+odd, and not nearly so repulsive, as your notion, that we old women are
+the mummies of the girls who came before us. It is easier, as well as far
+sweeter, for me to believe that our youth is somewhere immortal, than
+that it has been withered, shrivelled, desiccated into our old age. Oh,
+no, my dear, Paradise is not merely a garden of withered flowers! We
+shall find the rose and lily of our life blooming there."
+
+The hours had slipped away unnoticed as the friends talked together, and
+now the lengthening shadows on the school-room floor recalled Miss
+Ludington to the present, and to the duties of a hostess.
+
+As they walked slowly across the green toward the homestead, she told her
+friend more fully of this belief in the immortality of past selves which
+had so recently come to her, and especially how it had quite taken away
+the melancholy with which she had all her life before looked back upon
+her youth. Mrs. Slater listened in silence.
+
+"Where on earth did you get that portrait?" she exclaimed, as Miss
+Ludington, after taking her on a tour through the house before tea,
+brought her into the sitting-room.
+
+"Whom does it remind you of?" asked Miss Ludington.
+
+"I know whom it reminds me of," replied Mrs. Slater; "but how it ever got
+here is what puzzles me."
+
+"I thought you would recognize it," said Miss Ludington, with a pleased
+smile. "I suppose you think it odd you should never have seen it,
+considering whom it is of?"
+
+"I do, certainly," replied Mrs. Slater.
+
+"You see," explained Miss Ludington, "I did not have it painted till
+after I left Hilton. You remember that little ivory portrait of myself at
+seventeen, which I thought so much of after I lost my looks? Well, this
+portrait I had enlarged from that. I have always believed that it was
+very like, but you don't know what a reassurance it is to me to have you
+recognize it so instantly."
+
+At the tea-table Paul appeared, and was introduced to Mrs. Slater, who
+regarded him with considerable interest. Miss Ludington had informed her
+that he was her cousin and heir, and had told her something of his
+romantic devotion to the Ida of the picture. Paul, who from Miss
+Ludington had learned all there was to be known about the persons and
+places of old Hilton, entered with much interest into the conversation of
+the ladies on the subject, and after tea accompanied them in their stroll
+through that part of the village which they had not inspected before.
+
+When they returned to the house it was quite dark, and they had lights in
+the sitting-room, and refreshments were served. Mrs. Slater's eyes were
+frequently drawn toward the picture over the fireplace, and some
+reference of hers to the immortelles in which it was framed, turned the
+conversation upon the subject that Miss Ludington and she had been
+discussing in the school-house.
+
+Mrs. Slater, whose conversation showed her to be a woman of no great
+culture, but unusual force of character and intelligence, expressed
+herself as interested in the idea of the immortality of past selves, but
+decidedly sceptical. Paul grew eloquent in maintaining its truth and
+reasonableness, and, indeed, that it was the only intelligible theory of
+immortality that was possible. The idea that the same soul successively
+animated infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, and maturity, was, he
+argued, but a modification of the curious East Indian dream of
+metempsychosis, according to which every soul is supposed to inhabit in
+turn innumerable bodies.
+
+"You almost persuade me," said Mrs. Slater, at last. "But I never heard
+of the spirit of anybody's past self appearing to them. If there are such
+spirits, why have they never manifested themselves? Nobody every heard of
+the spirit of one's past self appearing at a spiritualist seance, for
+instance."
+
+"There is one evidence among others," replied Paul. "that spiritualism is
+a fraud. The mediums merely follow the vulgar superstition in the kind of
+spirits that they claim to produce."
+
+"Very likely you are right," said Mrs. Slater. "In fact, I presume you
+are quite right. And yet, if I really believed as you do, do you know
+what I would do? I would go to some of the spirit mediums over in New
+York, of whom the papers are giving such wonderful accounts, and let them
+try to materialize for me the spirit of my youth. Probably they couldn't
+do it, but possibly they might; and a mighty little sight, Mr. De Riemer,
+is more convincing than all the belief in the world. If I could see the
+spirit of my youth face to face, I should believe that it had a separate
+existence from my own. Otherwise, I don't believe I ever could."
+
+"But the mediums are a set of humbugs!" exclaimed Paul; and then he
+added, "I beg your pardon. Perhaps you are a spiritualist?"
+
+"You need not beg my pardon," said Mrs. Slater, good-humouredly. "I am
+not a spiritualist beyond thinking--and that is only lately--that there
+may possibly be something in it, after all. Perhaps there may be, for
+example, one part of truth to a hundred parts of fraud. I really don't
+believe there is more. Now, as you think the mediums humbugs, and I am
+sure most of them are, their failure to accomplish anything would not
+shake your faith in your theory, and you would only have lost an evening
+and the fee you paid the medium. On the other hand, there is a bare
+possibility--mind you, I think it is no more than that--a bare
+possibility, say the smallest possible chance, but a chance--that you
+would see--her," and Mrs. Slater glanced at the portrait.
+
+Paul turned pale.
+
+Miss Ludington, with much agitation, exclaimed, "If I thought there was
+any possibility of that, do you suppose, Sarah, that I would consider
+time or money?"
+
+"I don't suppose you would," replied Mrs. Slater. "You would not need to;
+but the money is something which I should have to consider, if it were my
+case. The best materializing mediums charge pretty well. Mrs. Legrand,
+who I believe is considered the leading light just now, charges fifty
+dollars for a private seance. Now, fifty dollars, I suppose, does not
+seem a large sum to you, but it would be a great deal for a poor woman
+like me to spend. And yet if I believed this wonderful thing that you
+believe, and I thought there was one chance in a million that this woman
+could demonstrate it to me by the assurance of sight, I would live on
+crusts from the gutter till I had earned the money to go to her."
+
+Paul rose from his chair, and, after walking across the floor once or
+twice, stood leaning his arm on the mantelpiece. He cleared his throat,
+and said:
+
+"Have you ever seen this Mrs. Legrand yourself? I mean, have you ever
+been present at one of her seances?"
+
+"Not on my own account," replied Mrs. Slater. "It was a mere accident my
+chancing to know anything about her. I have a friend, a Mrs. Rhinehart,
+who has recently lost her husband, and she got in a way of going to this
+Mrs. Legrand's seances to see him, and once she took me with her."
+
+Miss Ludington and Paul waited a moment, and then, perceiving that she
+was not going to say anything more, exclaimed in the same breath, "Did
+you see anything?"
+
+"We saw the figure of a fine-looking man," replied Mrs. Slater. "We could
+distinguish his features and expression very plainly, and he seemed to
+recognize my friend. She said that it was her husband. Of course I know
+nothing about that. I had never seen him alive. It may all have been a
+humbug, as I was prepared to believe it; but I assure you it was a
+curious business, and I haven't got over the impression which it made on
+me, yet. I'm not given to believing in things that claim to be
+supernatural, but I will admit that what I saw that night was very
+strange. Humbug or no humbug, what she saw seemed to comfort my poor
+friend more than all the religions or philosophies ever revealed or
+invented could have done. You see, these are so vague, even when we try
+to believe them, and that was so plain."
+
+A silence followed Mrs. Slater's words, during which she sat with an
+absent expression of countenance and a faraway look, as if recalling in
+fancy the scene which she had described. Miss Ludington's hands trembled
+as they lay together in her lap, and she was regarding the picture of the
+girl over the fireplace with a fixed and intense gaze, apparently
+oblivious of all else.
+
+Paul broke the silence. "I am going to see this woman," he said, quietly.
+"You need not think of going with me, aunty, unless you care to. I will
+go alone."
+
+"Do you think I shall let you go alone?" replied Miss Ludington, in a
+voice which she steadied with difficulty. "Am I not as much concerned as
+you are, Paul?"
+
+"Where does this Mrs. Legrand live?" Paul asked Mrs. Slater.
+
+"I really can't tell you that, Mr. De Riemer," she said. "It was sometime
+ago that I attended the seance I spoke of, and all I recall is that it
+was somewhere in the lower part of the city, on the east side of the
+Broadway, if I am not mistaken."
+
+"Perhaps you could ascertain her address from the friend of whom you
+spoke, if it would not be too much trouble?" suggested Miss Ludington.
+
+"I might do that," assented Mrs. Slater. "If she still goes to the
+seances she would know it. But these mediums don't generally stay long in
+one place, and it is quite possible that this Mrs. Legrand may not be in
+the city now, But if I can get her address for you I will. And now, my
+dear, as I am rather tired after our walk about the village, and probably
+you are too, will I go to my room."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+
+Mrs. Slater went away the next morning. On the following day but one Miss
+Ludington received a letter from her. She told her friend how glad she
+was that she had not postponed her visit to her, for if she had set it
+for a single day later she could not have made it at all. When she
+returned home she found that her husband had received an offer of a
+lucrative business position in Cincinnati, contingent on his immediate
+removal there.
+
+They had been in a whirl of packing ever since, and were to take that
+night's train for Cincinnati, and whether they ever again came East to
+live was very doubtful. In a postscript, written crosswise, she said:
+
+"I have been in such a rush ever since I came home that I declare I had
+clean forgotten till this moment about my promise to hunt up Mrs.
+Legrand's address for you. Very likely you have also forgotten by this
+time our talk about her, and if so it will not matter. But it vexes me to
+fail in a promise, and, if possible, I will snatch a moment before we
+leave to send a note to the friend I spoke of, and ask her to look the
+woman up for you."
+
+Instead of being disappointed, Miss Ludington was, on the whole, relieved
+to get this letter, and inclined to hope that Mrs. Slater had failed to
+find the time to write her friend. In that case this extraordinary
+project of visiting a spiritualist medium would quietly fall through,
+which was the best thing that could happen.
+
+The fact is, after sleeping on it, she had seen clearly that such a
+proceeding for a person of her position and antecedents would not only be
+preposterous, but almost disreputable. She was astonished at herself to
+think that her feelings could have been so wrought upon as to cause her
+seriously to contemplate such a step. All her life she had held the
+conviction, which she supposed to be shared by all persons of culture and
+respectability, that spiritualism was a low and immoral superstition,
+invariably implying fraud in its professors, and folly in its dupes:
+something, in fact, quite below the notice of persons of intelligence or
+good taste. As for the idea that this medium could show her the spirit of
+her former self, or any other real spirit, it was simply imbecile to
+entertain it for a moment.
+
+If, however, Miss Ludington was relieved by Mrs. Slater's letter, Paul
+was keenly disappointed. His prejudice against spiritualism was by no
+means so deeply rooted as hers. In a general way he had always believed
+mediums to be frauds, and their shows mere shams, but he had been ready
+to allow with Mrs. Slater, that, mixed up in all this fraud, there might
+be a very little truth.
+
+His mind admitted a bare possibility that this Mrs. Legrand might be able
+to show him the living face and form of his spirit-love. That possibility
+once admitted had completely dominated his imagination, and it made
+little difference whether it was one chance in a thousand or one in a
+million. He was like the victim of the lottery mania, whose absorption in
+contemplating the possibility of drawing the prize renders him quite
+oblivious of the nine hundred and ninety-nine blank tickets.
+
+Previous to Mrs. Slater's visit he had been quite content in his devotion
+to an ideal mistress, for the reason that any nearer approach to her had
+not occurred to him as a possibility. But now the suggestion that he
+might see her face to face had so inflamed his imagination that it was
+out of the question for him to regain his former serenity. He resolved
+that, in case they should fail to hear from Mrs. Slater's friend, he
+would set about finding Mrs. Legrand himself, or, failing that, would go
+to some other medium. There would be no solace for the fever that had now
+got into his blood, until experiment should justify his daring hope, or
+prove it baseless.
+
+However, the third day after Mrs. Slater's letter there came one from her
+friend, Mrs. Rhinehart. She said that she had received a note from Mrs.
+Slater, who had suddenly been called to Cincinnati, telling that Miss
+Ludington desired the address of Mrs. Legrand, with a view to securing a
+private seance. She could have sent the address at once, as she had it;
+but Mrs. Legrand was so overrun with business that an application to her
+by letter, especially from a stranger like Miss Ludington, might not have
+any result. And so Mrs. Rhinehart, who had been only too happy to oblige
+any friend of Mrs. Slater's, had called personally upon Mrs. Legrand to
+arrange for the seance. The medium had told her at first that she was
+full of previous engagements for a month ahead, and that it would be
+impossible to give Miss Ludington a seance. When, however, Mrs. Rhinehart
+told her that Miss Ludington's purpose in asking for the seance was to
+test the question whether our past selves have immortal souls distinct
+from our present selves, Mrs. Legrand became greatly interested, and at
+once said that she would cancel a previous appointment, and give Miss
+Ludington a seance the following evening, at her parlours, No.-East Tenth
+Street, at nine o'clock. Mrs. Legrand had said that while she had never
+heard a belief in the immortality of past selves avowed, there had not
+been lacking in her relations with the spirit-world some mysterious
+experiences that seemed to confirm it. She should, therefore, look
+forward to the issue of the experiment the following evening with nearly
+as much confidence, and quite as much interest, as Miss Ludington
+herself. Mrs. Rhinehart hoped that the following evening would be
+convenient for Miss Ludington. She had assumed the responsibility of
+making the engagement positive, as she might have failed in securing a
+seance altogether had she waited to communicate with Miss Ludington.
+Hoping that "the conditions would be favourable," she remained, &c. &c..
+
+When Miss Ludington had read this letter to Paul, she intimated, though
+rather faintly, that it was still not too late to withdraw from the
+enterprise; they could send Mrs. Legrand her fee, say that it was not
+convenient for them to come on the evening fixed, and so let the matter
+drop. Paul stared at her in astonishment, and said that, if she did not
+feel like going, he would go alone, as he had at first proposed. Upon
+this Miss Ludington once more declared that they would go together, and
+said nothing further about sacrificing the appointment.
+
+The fact is she did not really wish to sacrifice it. She was experiencing
+a revulsion of feeling; Mrs. Rhinehart's letter had affected her almost
+as strongly as Mrs. Slater's talk. The fact that Mrs. Legrand had at once
+seen the reasonableness and probability of the belief in the immortality
+of past selves made it difficult for Miss Ludington to think of her as a
+mere vulgar impostor. The vague hint of the medium's as to strange
+experiences with the spirit world, confirmatory of this belief, appealed
+to her imagination in a powerful manner. Of what description might the
+mysterious monitions be, which, coming to this woman in the dim
+between-world where she groped, had prepared her to accept as true, on
+its first statement, a belief that to others seemed so hard to credit?
+What clutchings of spirit fingers in the dark! What meanings of souls
+whom no one recognised!
+
+The confidence which Mrs. Legrand had expressed that the seance would
+prove a success affected Miss Ludington very powerfully. It impressed her
+as the judgment of an expert; it compelled her to recognize not only as
+possible, but even as probable, that, on the evening of the following
+day, she should behold the beautiful girl whom once, so many years
+before, she had called herself; for so at best would words express this
+wonder.
+
+With a trembling ecstasy, which in vain she tried to reason down, she
+began to prepare herself for the presence of one fresh from the face of
+God and the awful precincts of eternity.
+
+As for Paul, there was no conflict of feeling with prejudice in his case;
+he gave himself wholly up to a delirious expectation. How would his
+immortal mistress look? How would she move? What would be her
+stature--what her bearing? How would she gaze upon him? If not with love
+he should die at her feet. If with love how should he bear it?
+
+Mrs. Rhinehart's letter had been received in the morning, and during the
+rest of the day Miss Ludington and Paul seemed quite to forget each other
+in their absorption in the thoughts suggested by the approaching event.
+They sat abstracted and silent at table, and, on rising, went each their
+own way. In the exalted state of their imaginations the enterprise they
+had in hand would not bear talking over.
+
+When she retired to bed Miss Ludington found that sleep was out of the
+question. About two o'clock in the morning she heard Paul leave his room
+and go downstairs. Putting on dressing-gown and slippers she softly
+followed him. There was a light in the sitting-room and the door was
+ajar. Stepping noiselessly to it she looked in.
+
+Paul was standing before, the fireplace, leaning on the mantelpiece, and
+looking up into the eyes of the girl above, smiling and talking softly to
+her, Miss Ludington entered the room and laid her hand gently on his arm.
+Her appearance did not seem to startle him in the least. "Paul, my dear
+boy!" she said, "you had better go to bed,"
+
+"It's no use," he said; "I can't sleep, and I had to come down here and
+look at her, Think, just think, aunty, that to-morrow we shall see her."
+
+The young fellow's nervous excitement culminated in a burst of ecstatic
+tears, and soon afterwards Miss Ludington induced him to go to bed.
+
+How much more he loved the girl than even she did! She was filled with
+dread as she thought of the effect which a disappointment of the hope he
+had given himself up to might produce. And what folly, after all, it was
+to expect anything but disappointment!
+
+The spectacle of Paul's fatuous confidence had taken hers away.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+
+As the drive over to East Tenth Street was a long one, the carriage had
+been ordered at seven o'clock, and soon after tea, of which neither Miss
+Ludington nor Paul had been able to take a mouthful, they set out.
+
+"I am afraid we are doing something very wrong and foolish," said Miss
+Ludington, feebly, as the carriage rolled down the village street.
+
+During the drive of nearly two hours not another word was said.
+
+The carriage at length drew up before the house in Tenth Street. It stood
+in a brick block, and there was no sign of the business pursued within,
+except a small white card on the door bearing the words, "Mrs. Legrand.
+Materializing, Business, and Test Medium. Clairvoyant."
+
+An old-looking little girl of ten or twelve years of age opened the door.
+The child's big black eyes, and long snaky locks falling about a pale
+face, gave her an elfish look quite in keeping with the character of the
+house. She at once ushered the callers into the front parlour, where a
+lady and gentleman were sitting, who proved to be Mrs. Legrand and her
+manager and man of business, Dr. Hull.
+
+The latter was a tall person, of highly respectable and even imposing
+appearance, to which a high forehead, a pair of gold-bowed spectacles,
+and a long white beard considerably added. He looked like a scholar, and
+his speech was that of a man of education.
+
+Mrs. Legrand was a large woman, with black hair sprinkled with grey and
+worn short like a man's. She had a swarthy complexion, and her eyes were
+surrounded by noticeably large dark rings, giving an appearance of
+wretched ill-health. Her manner was extremely languid, as of a person
+suffering from nervous exhaustion. She kept her eyes half shut, and spoke
+as if with an effort,
+
+"Did Mrs. Rhinehart tell you," she said to Miss Ludington, "of the
+interest which I feel in your theory, that the souls of our past selves
+exist in spirit-land? If my seance to-night realizes your expectations,
+spirit science will have taken a great step forward."
+
+"My conviction will remain the same whatever the result may be to night,"
+said Miss Ludington.
+
+"I am glad to hear you say so," replied Mrs. Legrand languidly; "but I
+feel that we shall be successful, and my intuitions rarely deceive me."
+
+A trembling came over Paul at these words.
+
+There was a little more general conversation, and the silence which
+followed was interrupted by Dr. Hull.
+
+"I suppose there is no reason why the seance should not proceed, Mrs.
+Legrand?"
+
+"I know of none," assented that lady in lifeless tones. "Please show our
+friends the cabinet."
+
+Dr. Hull rose. "It is usual," he said, "for those who attend our seances
+to be asked to satisfy themselves that deception is impossible by an
+examination of the apartment which Mrs. Legrand occupies during her
+trance, and from which the materialized spirit appears. Will you kindly
+step this way?"
+
+The room in which they sat was a long apartment, divided by double
+sliding-doors into a front and back parlour, the former of which had been
+the scene of the preceding conversation.
+
+Dr. Hull now conducted the two visitors into the back parlour, which
+proved to be of similar size and appearance to the front parlour, except
+that it contained no furniture whatever. There was only one window in the
+back parlour, and this was firmly closed by inside blinds.
+
+It was also uncurtained, and in plain view from the front parlour.
+Besides the connection with the front parlour, there was but one door in
+the back parlour. This opened into a small apartment, about six feet by
+five, which had been taken out of the right-hand rear corner of the back
+parlour, and was separated from it by a partition reaching to the
+ceiling. This was the cabinet. It had neither window nor door, except the
+one into the back parlour. A sofa was its only article of furniture, and
+this was of wicker-work, so that nothing could be concealed beneath it.
+
+"Mrs. Legrand lies upon this sofa while in a state of trance, during
+which the spirit is materialized, and appears to us," explained Dr. Hull.
+
+A rug lay on the floor of the cabinet, the walls were of hard-finished
+white plaster, quite bare, and the ceiling, like that of the parlours,
+was plain white, without ornament.
+
+There seemed no possibility of introducing any person into the cabinet or
+the back parlour without the knowledge of those in the front parlour. But
+Dr. Hull insisted upon making assurance doubly sure by pounding upon the
+walls and pulling up the rug in the cabinet, to prove that no sliding
+panel or trap-door trick was possible. There was something calculated to
+make an unbeliever very uneasy in the quiet confidence of these people,
+and the business-like way in which they went to work to make it
+impossible to account for any phenomenon that might appear, on any other
+but a supernatural theory. No doubt whatever now remained in the mind of
+Miss Ludington or Paul that the wonderful mystery which they had hardly
+dared to dream of was about to be enacted before them. They followed Dr.
+Hull on his tour of inspection as if they were in a dream, mechanically
+observing what he pointed out, but replying at random to his remarks,
+and, indeed, barely aware of what they were doing. The sense of the
+unspeakably awful and tender scene so soon to pass before their eyes
+absorbed every susceptibility of their minds.
+
+Nor indeed would this detective work have had any interest for them in
+any case. They would have been willing to concede the medium all the
+machinery she desired. There was no danger that they could be deceived as
+to the reality of the face and form that for so many years had been
+enshrined in their memories.
+
+There might be as many side entrances to the cabinet as desired, but she
+whom they looked for could come only from the spirit-land.
+
+The front parlour, too, having been investigated, to show the
+impossibility of any person's being concealed there, Dr. Hull proceeded
+to close and lock the hall-door, that being the only exit connecting this
+suite of rooms with the rest of the house. Having placed a heavy chair
+against the locked door for further security, he gave the key to Paul.
+
+Mrs. Legrand now rose, and without a word to any one passed through the
+back parlour and disappeared in the cabinet.
+
+As she did so a wild desire to fly from the room and the house came over
+Miss Ludington. Not that she did not long inexpressibly to see the vision
+that was drawing near, whose beautiful feet might even now be on the
+threshold, but the sense of its awfulness overcame her. She felt that she
+was not fit, not ready, for it now. If she could only have more time to
+prepare herself, and then could come again. But it was too late to draw
+back.
+
+Dr. Hull had arranged three chairs across the broad doorway between the
+back and front parlours, and facing the former. He asked Miss Ludington
+to occupy the middle chair, and, trembling in every limb, she did so.
+Paul took the chair by her side, the other being apparently for Dr. Hull.
+
+The elfish little girl, whom they called Alta, and who appeared to be the
+daughter of Mrs. Legrand, meanwhile took her place at a piano standing in
+the front parlour.
+
+All being now ready, Dr. Hull proceeded to turn the gas in the two
+parlours very low. The jets in both rooms were controlled by a stop-cock
+in the wall by the side of the doorway between them. There were two jets
+in the back parlour, fastened to the wall dividing it from the front
+parlour, one on each side of the door, so as to throw light on any figure
+coming out of the cabinet. The light they diffused, after being turned
+down; was enough to render forms and faces sufficiently visible for the
+recognition of acquaintances, though a close study of features would have
+been difficult.
+
+It now appeared that the glass shades of the jets in the back parlour
+were of a bluish tint, which lent a peculiarly weird effect to the
+illumination.
+
+Dr. Hull now took the remaining chair by Miss Ludington's side, and a
+perfect silence of some moments ensued, during which she could perfectly
+hear the beating of Paul's heart. Then Alta began, with a wonderfully
+soft touch, to play a succession of low, dreamy chords, rather than any
+set composition--music that thrilled the listeners with vague suggestions
+of the unfathomable mystery and unutterable sadness of human life. She
+played on and on. It seemed to two of the hearers that she played for
+hours, although it was probably but a few minutes.
+
+At last the music flowed slower, trickled, fell in drops, and ceased.
+
+They had a sensation of being breathed upon by a faint, cool draught of
+air, and then appeared in the door-way of the cabinet the figure of a
+beautiful girl, which, after standing still a moment, glided forth, by an
+imperceptible motion, into the room.
+
+The light, which had before seemed so faint, now proved sufficient to
+bring out every line of her face and form. Or was it that the figure
+itself was luminous by some light from within?
+
+Paul heard Miss Ludington gasp; but if he had known that she was dying he
+could not have taken his eyes from the apparition.
+
+For it was Ida who stood before him; no counterfeit of the painter now,
+but radiant with life.
+
+Her costume was exactly that of her picture, white, with a low bodice;
+but how utterly had the artist failed to reproduce the ravishing contours
+of her young form, the enchanting sweetness of her expression. The golden
+hair fell in luxuriant tresses about the face and down the dazzling
+shoulders. The lips were parted in a pleased smile as, with a gliding
+motion, she approached the rapt watchers.
+
+Her eyes rested on Miss Ludington with a look full of recognition and a
+tenderness that seemed beyond the power of mortal eyes to express.
+
+Then she looked at Paul. Her smile was no longer the smile of an angel,
+but of a woman. The light of her violet eyes burned like delicious flame
+to the marrow of his bones.
+
+She was so near him that he could have touched her. Her beauty overcame
+his senses. Forgetting all else, in an agony of love, he was about to
+clasp her in his arms, but she drew back with a gentle gesture of denial.
+
+Then a sudden and indescribable wavering passed over her face, like the
+passing of the wind over a field of rye, and slowly, as if reluctantly
+obeying an unseen attraction, she retreated, still facing them, across
+the room, and disappeared within the cabinet,
+
+Instantly Alta touched the piano, playing the same slow, heavy chords as
+before. But this time she played but a few moments, and when she ceased,
+Mrs. Legrand's voice was heard faintly calling her. She glided between
+the chairs in the door-way and entered the cabinet, drawing a _portiere_
+across its door behind her.
+
+As she did so, Dr. Hull touched the stopcock in the wall by his side,
+turning on the gas in both parlours, and proceeded to unlock and open the
+hall-door.
+
+"It was the most successful seance I have ever witnessed," he said. "The
+conditions must have been unusually favourable. How were you pleased,
+Miss Ludington?"
+
+The abrupt transition from the shadows of the between-world to the glare
+of gas-light, from the communion of spirits to the brisk business-like
+tones of Dr. Hull, was quite too much for the poor lady, and with a
+piteous gesture, she buried her face in her hands. Alta now came out of
+the cabinet, and said that her mother would like them to examine it once
+more.
+
+Miss Ludington took no notice of the request, but Paul, who had continued
+to sit staring into vacancy, as if for him the seance were still going
+on, sprang up at Alta's invitation and accepted it with alacrity. The
+eagerness with which he peered into the corner of the cabinet, and the
+disappointment which his face showed when he perceived no trace of any
+person there save Mrs. Legrand and Alta, might naturally have suggested
+to them that he suspected fraud; but the fact was very different. His
+conduct was merely the result of a confused hope that he might gain
+another glimpse of Ida by following her to the place within which she had
+vanished.
+
+When Paul looked into the cabinet, Mrs. Legrand was lying upon the
+lounge, and Alta was administering smelling salts to her. As he turned
+away disappointed, the medium rose, and leaning on her daughter, returned
+to the front parlour. She looked completely overcome. Her face was
+deathly pale, and the dark rings around her eyes were larger and darker
+than ever. She leaned back in her chair, which had a special rest for her
+head, and closed her eyes.
+
+As neither Dr. Hull nor Alta showed any surprise at her condition, it was
+apparently the ordinary result of a seance.
+
+To her faint inquiry whether the materialization had been satisfactory to
+Miss Ludington, the latter replied that it had been all, and more than
+all, she had dared dream of. Dr. Hull, in a very enthusiastic manner,
+went on to describe the manifestation more particularly. He declared that
+the present evening a new world of spirit-life had been revealed, and a
+new era in spiritualism had opened.
+
+"I have been devoted to the study of spiritualism for thirty years," he
+exclaimed; "but I have never been present at so wonderful a seance as
+this. I grow dizzy when I think of the field of speculation which it
+opens up. The spirits of our past selves--? And yet why not, why not?
+Like all great discoveries it seems most simple when once brought to
+light. It accounts, no doubt, for the throng of unknown spirits of which
+mediums are so often conscious, and for the many materializations and
+communications which no one recognizes."
+
+Meanwhile the wretched appearance of the medium aroused Miss Ludington's
+sympathies, in spite of the distracted condition of her mind.
+
+"Is Mrs. Legrand always prostrated in this manner after a seance?" she
+asked.
+
+Dr. Hull answered for the medium. "Not generally quite so much so," he
+said; "the strain on her vitality is always very trying, but it is
+especially so when a new spirit materializes, as to-night. Out of her
+being, somehow, and just how, I know no better than you, is woven the
+veil of seeming flesh, yes, and even the clothing which the spirit
+assumes in order to appear. The fact that Mrs. Legrand suffers from heart
+disease makes seances not only more exhausting for her than for other
+mediums, but really dangerous. I have told her, as a physician, and other
+physicians have told her, that she is liable at any time to die in a
+trance."
+
+Paul now spoke for the first time since the conclusion of the seance.
+"What do you fancy would be the effect on the spirit if a medium should
+die during a materialization, as you have supposed?" he inquired.
+
+"That can only be a matter of theory," replied Dr. Hull; "the accident
+has never happened."
+
+"But it might happen."
+
+"Yes, it might happen."
+
+"Is not the spirit as much dependent on the medium for dematerializing
+and resuming the spirit-form, as for materializing?" asked Paul.
+
+"I see what you mean," said Dr. Hull. "You think that in case the medium
+should die during a materialization, the spirit might be left in a
+materialized state. How does it strike you, Mrs. Legrand?"
+
+"I don't know," replied that lady, with her eyes closed. "Spirits require
+our aid as much to lay aside their bodies as to assume them. If the
+medium died meantime, I should think that the spirit might find some
+trouble in dematerializing."
+
+"Is it not possible," said Paul, "that it might be unable to
+dematerialize at all? Would not the medium's death close against it the
+only door by which it could return to the spirit-world, shutting it out
+in this life with us henceforth? More than that: would not the already
+materialized spirit be in a position to succeed to the physical life
+which the medium relinquished? Already possessed of a part of the
+medium's vitality, would not the remainder naturally flow to it when
+given up in death, and thus complete its materialization?"
+
+"And give it an earthly body like ours?" exclaimed Miss Ludington.
+
+"Yes, like ours," replied Paul. "I suppose it would simply take up its
+former life on earth where it had been left off, ceasing to possess a
+spirit's powers, and knowing only what and whom it knew at the point when
+its first life on earth had ceased."
+
+"After what I have seen to-night, nothing will ever seem impossible to me
+again," said Miss Ludington.
+
+"As Miss Ludington suggests," observed Dr. Hull, "in spiritualism one
+soon ceases to consider whether a thing be wonderful or not, but only if
+it be true. And so as to this matter. Now, if the death of a medium
+should be absolutely instantaneous, the spirit might, indeed, be unable
+to dematerialize, and might even succeed to the medium's earth life, as
+you suggest. The trouble with the theory--and it seems to me a fatal
+one--is, that death is almost never, if indeed it is ever, absolutely
+instantaneous but only comparatively so; and it seems to me that the
+least possible interval of time would be sufficient to enable the spirit
+to dematerialize. Consequently, it strikes me, that while the result you
+suppose is theoretically possible, it could, practically, never occur.
+Still, the subject is one of mere conjecture at most, and one opinion is,
+perhaps, as good as another."
+
+"I think you are probably right," said Paul; "it was only a fancy I had."
+
+"Why does Mrs. Legrand persist in giving seances if she is not in a fit
+condition?" said Miss Ludington.
+
+"Well," replied Dr. Hull, "you see we spiritualists do not regard death
+as so serious a matter as do many others. Our mediums, especially, who
+stand with one hand clasped by spirits and the other by mortals, are
+almost indifferent which way they are drawn; besides, you see, she is
+recognized as the most fully developed medium in the United States
+to-day, and many spirits, which cannot materialize through other mediums,
+are dependent upon her; she feels that she has a duty to discharge
+towards the spirit-world, at whatever risk to herself. I doubt if
+to-night's seance, for example, would have been successful with any other
+medium."
+
+Immediately after this conversation Miss Ludington and Paul took their
+departure. Dr. Hull went, out with them to the carriage, and was obliged
+to remind them of the little matter of Mrs. Legrand's fee, which they had
+entirely forgotten.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+
+Now, before she ever had heard of Mrs. Legrand, Miss Ludington had fully
+believed that her former self had an immortal existence, apart and
+distinct from her present self, and Paul, to whom she was indebted for
+this belief, held it even more firmly than she.
+
+But there is a great difference between the strongest form of faith and
+the absolute assurance of sight. The effect of the vision which they had
+witnessed in Mrs. Legrand's parlours was almost as startling as if they
+had not expected to see it.
+
+Very little was said in the carriage going home, but, as they were
+crossing the ferry, Miss Ludington exclaimed, in an awestruck voice,
+
+"O Paul! was it not strange!"
+
+"Strange? Strange?" he echoed, in strong, exultant tones. "How oddly you
+use the word, aunty! You might well say how strange, if we mortals were
+isolated here on this little island of time, with no communication with
+the mainland of eternity; but how can you call it strange when you find
+out that we are not isolated? Surely it is not strange, but supremely
+reasonable, right, and natural."
+
+"I suppose it is so," said Miss Ludington, "but if I had let you go alone
+to-night, and stayed at home, I could never have fully believed you when
+you told me what you had seen any more than I shall ever expect any one
+to believe me. Think, Paul, if I had not gone, if I had not seen her, if
+she had not given me that look! I knew, of course, if she appeared that I
+should recognize her, but I did not dare to be sure that she would
+recognize me. I remember her, but she never saw me on earth."
+
+"It was as a spirit that she knew you, and that is the way she knew me,
+and knew that I loved her," said Paul, with a sudden huskiness in his
+voice.
+
+"Surely that makes it clear," said Miss Ludington, "that the spirits of
+our past selves love us who follow them, as we, in looking back, yearn
+after them, and not merely await us at the end, but are permitted to
+watch over us as we complete the journey which they began. I am sure that
+if people knew this they would never feel lonely or forlorn again."
+
+It was a relief to Paul when they reached home and he could be alone.
+
+In an ecstasy of happiness that was like a delicious pain, he sat till
+morning in his unlighted chamber, gazing into the darkness with a set
+smile, motionless, and breathing only by deep, infrequent inhalations.
+What were the joys of mortal love to the transports that were his? What
+were the smoky fires of earthly passion to his pure, keen flame, almost
+too strong for a heart of flesh to bear?
+
+As he strove to realize what it was to be beloved by an immortal, the
+veil between time and eternity was melted by the hot breath of his
+passion, and the confines of the natural and the supernatural were
+confounded.
+
+As the east grew light he began to feel the weariness of the intense
+mental strain which had led up to, and culminated in, the transcendent
+experience of the previous evening. A tranquil happiness succeeded his
+exalted mood, and, lying down, he slept soundly till noon, when he went
+downstairs to find Miss Ludington anxiously waiting for him to reassure
+her that her recollection of the last night was not altogether a dream,
+as she had half convinced herself since waking.
+
+Paul had to go into Brooklyn to do some business for Miss Ludington that
+day, but the men he dealt with seemed to him shadows.
+
+After finishing with them he went over to New York, and presently found
+himself on East Tenth Street. He had not intended to go there. His feet
+had borne him involuntarily to the spot. He could not resist the
+temptation of drawing near to the place where she had been only a few
+hours before. He walked to and fro before Mrs. Legrand's house for an
+hour, and then stood a long time on the opposite side, looking at the
+closed windows of the front parlour, quite unconscious that he had become
+an object of curiosity to numerous persons in adjoining houses, and of
+marked suspicion to the policeman at the corner.
+
+Finally he crossed the street, mounted the steps, and rang the bell. The
+door was opened, after a considerable interval, by Alta, the elfish
+little girl. Paul asked for Mrs. Legrand. Alta said that her mother was
+ill to-day, and not able to see any one. Paul then asked for Dr. Hull. He
+was not in.
+
+"I wanted to arrange for another seance," he said.
+
+"Will you write, or will you call to-morrow?" asked Alta, in a
+business-like manner.
+
+Paul said he would call. Then he hesitated.
+
+"Excuse me," he said, "but may I ask you if there is any one now in the
+parlour where we were last night?"
+
+"No one is there," replied the little girl.
+
+"Could you let me just go in and see where she was?" asked Paul, humbly.
+"I would not keep you a moment."
+
+Alta, in her character of door-keeper to this house of mystery, was,
+doubtless, in the habit of seeing queer people, bent on queer errands.
+She merely asked him to step within the hall, saying that she would speak
+to her mother. Presently she returned with the desired permission, and,
+producing a key, unlocked the parlour door, and ushered Paul in.
+
+It was late in the afternoon, and the heavy curtains and blinds left the
+rooms almost dark. There was barely light enough to see that all was just
+as it had been the night before. The sounds of the street penetrated the
+closed apartments but faintly. With the step of one on holy ground, Paul
+advanced to the spot where he had been seated when the vision appeared to
+him the night before.
+
+Aided by the darkness, the silence, and by the identity of the
+surroundings, the memory of that vision returned to him as he stood there
+with a vividness which, in the overwrought condition of his nerves, it
+was impossible for him to distinguish from reality. Once more a radiant
+figure glided noiselessly from the cabinet, which was darkly outlined in
+the corner of the room, and stood before him. Once more her eyes burned
+on his, until, forgetting all but her beauty, he put forth his arms to
+clasp her. A startled exclamation from Alta banished the vision, and he
+perceived that he was smiling upon the empty air.
+
+He went away from the house ecstatically happy. He believed that he had
+really seen her. He had no doubt that, aided by the mediumship of love,
+she had actually appeared to him a second time in a form only a little
+less material than the night before.
+
+Of this experience he did not tell Miss Ludington. This interview, which
+Ida had granted to him alone, he kept as a precious secret.
+
+The next day, as he had promised, Paul called at Mrs. Legrand's and saw
+Dr. Hull. That gentleman was unable to promise him anything definite
+about a seance, on account of Mrs. Legrand's continued illness.
+
+"Is she seriously sick?" asked Paul, with a new terror.
+
+"I think not," said Dr. Hull; "but her trouble is of the heart, the
+result of the nervous crises which a trance medium is necessarily subject
+to, and a disease of the heart may at any time take an unexpected turn."
+
+"Has she the best advice?" asked Paul. "Excuse me; but if she has not,
+and if her pecuniary means do not enable her to afford it, I beg you will
+let me secure it for her."
+
+Dr. Hull thanked him, but said that he was a physician himself, and that,
+on account of his acquaintance with her constitutional peculiarities,
+Mrs. Legrand considered him, and he considered himself, better able to
+treat her than any strange physician. "You seem to be very much
+interested in her case," added the doctor, with a slight intonation of
+surprise.
+
+"Can you wonder?" replied Paul. "Is she not door-keeper between this
+world and the world of spirits where my love is? Don't think me brutal if
+I confess to you that what I think of most is that her death might close
+that door."
+
+"I do not think you brutal," replied Dr. Hull; "what you feel is very
+natural."
+
+"Is it not strange--is it not hard to bear," cried Paul, giving way to
+his feelings, "that the key of the gate between the world of spirits and
+of men should be intrusted to a weak and sickly woman?"
+
+"It is hard to bear, no doubt," replied Dr. Hull; "but it is not strange.
+It is in accordance with the laws by which this world has always been
+conducted. From the beginning has not the power of calling spirits out of
+the unknown into this earth life been intrusted to weak and sickly women?
+What the world loosely calls spiritualism is no isolated phenomenon or
+set of phenomena. The universe is spiritual. Much as we claim for our
+mediums, the mediumship of motherhood is far more marvellous. Our mediums
+can enable spirits already alive, and able by their own wills to
+cooperate, to pass before our eyes for a moment. To hold them longer in
+our view exceeds their power. But these other women, these mothers, call
+souls out of nothingness, and clothe them with bodies, so that they
+speak, walk, work, love, and hate, some forty, some fifty, some seventy
+years."
+
+"You are right," said Paul bowing his head. "It is not strange though it
+is hard to bear."
+
+The effect of the seance at Mrs. Legrand's upon Miss Ludington had been
+far less disturbing than upon Paul. To her it had been a lofty spiritual
+consolation, setting the seal of absolute assurance upon a faith that had
+been before too great, too strange, too beautiful for her to fully
+realize.
+
+When Paul brought word that Mrs. Legrand was sick and might die, and that
+if she died that first vision of Ida might also prove the last to be
+vouchsafed them on earth, although she was deeply grieved, yet the
+thought did not seem so intolerable to her as to him. She had, indeed,
+hoped that from time to time she should see Ida again; still, her life
+was mostly past, and it was chiefly upon the communion they would enjoy
+in heaven, not momentary and imperfect as here, but perennial and
+complete, that her heart was set.
+
+Very different was it with Paul. He was young; heaven was very far off,
+and the way thither, unless cheered by occasional visitations of his
+radiant mistress, seemed inexpressibly long and dreary. The nature of his
+sentiment for Ida had changed since he had seen her clothed in a living
+form, from the worship of a sweet but dim ideal to the passion which a
+living woman inspires. He thought of her no more as a spirit, lofty and
+serene, but as a beautiful maiden with the love-light in her eyes.
+
+He was not able to find his former inspiration in the picture above the
+fireplace. Its still enchantment was gone. The set smile, that had ever
+before seemed so sweet, palled upon him. The eyes, that had always been
+so tender, now lacked expression. The lips that the boy had climbed up to
+kiss, how had the artist failed to intimate their exquisite curves! The
+whole picture had suffered a subtle deterioration, and looked hard,
+wooden, lifeless, and almost, unlike. The living woman had eclipsed the
+portrait. Fortunate it is for the fame of painters that their originals
+do not oftener return to earth.
+
+If Mrs. Legrand had been his own mother Paul could not have been more
+assiduous in his calls and inquiries as to her condition, nor could his
+relief have been greater when, a few days later, Dr. Hull told him that
+the case had taken a favourable turn, and according to her previous
+experience with such attacks, she would probably be as well as usual by
+the following day. Dr. Hull said that she had heard of Paul's frequent
+inquiries for her, and while she did not flatter herself that his
+interest in her was wholly on her own account, she was, nevertheless, so
+far grateful that she would give him the first seance which she was able
+to hold, and that would be, if she continued to improve, on the following
+evening.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+
+If Miss Ludington's desire for another glimpse of Ida had lacked the
+passionate intensity of Paul's, she had, notwithstanding, longed for it
+very ardently, and when at nine o'clock the next night the carriage drew
+up before Mrs. Legrand's door, she was in a transport of sweet
+anticipation.
+
+As for Paul he had dressed himself with extreme care for the occasion,
+and looked to his best advantage. He had said to himself, "Shall I not
+show her as much observance as I would pay to a living woman?" And who
+can say--for very odd, sometimes, are the inarticulate processes of the
+mind--that there was not at the bottom of his thoughts something of the
+universal lover's willingness to let his mistress see him at his best?
+
+They found the front parlour occupied as before by Mrs. Legrand and Dr.
+Hull, when Alta showed them in. The medium was, as previously, the
+picture of ill-health, and if she did not look noticeably worse than
+before her sickness, it was merely because she had looked as badly as
+possible then. In response to inquiries about her health she admitted
+that she did not really feel equal to resuming her seances quite so soon,
+and but for disliking to disappoint them would have postponed this
+evening's appointment. Dr. Hull had, indeed, urged her to do so.
+
+"You must not think of giving a seance if there is any risk of injury to
+your health," said Miss Ludington, though not without being sensible of a
+pang of disappointment. "We could not think of letting you do that, could
+we, Paul?"
+
+Paul's reply to this humane suggestion was not so prompt as it should
+have been. In his heart he felt at that moment that he was as bad as a
+murderer. He knew that he was willing this woman should risk not only her
+health, but even her life, rather than that he should fail to see Ida. He
+was striving to repress this feeling, so far at least as to say that he
+would not insist upon going on with the seance, when Mrs. Legrand, with a
+glance through her half-shut eyelids, intimating that she perfectly
+understood his thoughts, said, in a tone which put an end to the
+discussion, "Excuse me, but I shall certainly give the seance. I am much
+obliged for your interest in me; but I am rather notional about keeping
+my promises, and it is a peculiarity in which my friends have to indulge
+in. I daresay I shall be none the worse for the exertion."
+
+"Doctor," she added, "will you allow our friends to inspect the cabinet?"
+
+"That is quite needless," said Paul.
+
+"Our friends are often willing to waive an inspection," replied Dr. Hull.
+"We are grateful for the confidence shown, but, in justice to ourselves,
+as well as for their own more absolute assurance, we always insist upon
+it. Otherwise, suspicions of fraud not entertained, perhaps, at the time,
+might afterwards occur to the mind, or be suggested by others, to which
+they would have no conclusive answer."
+
+Upon this Miss Ludington and Paul permitted themselves to be conducted
+upon the same tour of inspection that they had made the former evening.
+They found everything precisely as it had been on that occasion. There
+was no possibility of concealing any person in the cabinet or the back
+parlour, and no apparent or conceivable means by which any person could
+reach those apartments, except through the front parlour.
+
+On their return to the latter apartment the proceedings followed the
+order observed at the previous seance. Mrs. Legrand rose from her chair
+and walked feebly through the back parlour into the cabinet. Dr. Hull
+then locked and braced a chair against the door opening into the hall,
+giving the key to Paul. Then, having arranged the three chairs as before,
+across the double door between the parlours, he seated Miss Ludington and
+Paul, and, having turned the gas down, took the third chair.
+
+All being ready, Alta, who was at the piano, struck the opening chords of
+the same soft, low music that she had played at the previous seance.
+
+It seemed to Miss Ludington that she played much longer than before, and
+she began to think that either there was to be some failure in the
+seance, or that something had happened to Mrs. Legrand.
+
+Perhaps she was dead. This horrible thought, added to the strain of
+expectancy, affected her nerves so that in another moment she must have
+screamed out, when, as before, she felt a faint, cool air fan her
+forehead, and a few seconds later Ida appeared at the door of the cabinet
+and glided into the room.
+
+She was dressed as at her former appearance, in white, with her shoulders
+bare, and the wealth of her golden hair falling to her waist behind.
+
+From the moment that she emerged from the shadows of the cabinet Paul's
+eyes were glued to her face with an intensity quite beyond any ordinary
+terms of description.
+
+Fancy having not over a minute in which to photograph upon the mind a
+form the recollection of which is to furnish the consolation of a
+lifetime. The difficulties of securing this second seance, and the doubt
+that involved the obtaining of another, had deeply impressed him. He
+might never again see Ida on earth, and upon the fidelity with which his
+memory retained every feature of her face, every line of her figure, his
+thoughts by day, and his dreams by night, might have to depend for their
+texture until he should meet her in another world.
+
+The lingering looks that are the lover's luxury were not for these
+fleeting seconds. His gaze burned upon her face and played around her
+form like lightning. He grudged the instantaneous muscles of the eye the
+time they took to make the circuit of her figure.
+
+But when, as on that other night, she came close up to him and smiled
+upon him, time and circumstance were instantly forgotten, and he fell
+into a state of enchantment in which will and thought were inert.
+
+He was aroused from it by an extraordinary change that came over her. She
+started and shivered slightly in every limb. The recognition faded out of
+her eyes and gave place to a blank bewilderment.
+
+Then came a turning of her head from side to side, while, with dilated
+eyes, she explored the dim recesses of the room with the startled
+expression of an awakened sleep-walker. She half turned toward the
+cabinet and made an undecided movement in that direction, and then, as if
+the invisible cord that drew her thither had broken, she wavered,
+stopped, and seemed to drift toward the opposite corner of the room.
+
+At that moment there was a gasp from the cabinet.
+
+Dr. Hull leaped to his feet and sprang toward it, at the same time, by a
+turn of the stopcock by his side, setting the gas in both rooms at full
+blaze.
+
+Alta, with a loud scream, rushed after him, and Miss Ludington and Paul
+followed them.
+
+The pupils of their eyes had been dilated to the utmost in order to
+follow the movements of the apparition in the nearly complete darkness,
+and the first effect of the sudden blaze of gaslight was to dazzle them
+so completely that they had actually to grope their way to the cabinet.
+
+The scene in the little apartment of the medium was a heartrending one.
+
+Mrs. Legrand's body and lower limbs lay on the sofa, which was the only
+article of furniture, and Dr. Hull was in the act of lifting her head
+from the floor to which it had fallen. Her eyes were half open, and the
+black rings around them showed with ghastly plainness against the awful
+pallor which the rest of her face had taken on. One hand was clenched.
+The other was clutching her bodice, as if in the act of tearing it open.
+A little foam flecked the blue lips.
+
+Alta threw herself upon her mother's body, sobbing, "Oh, mamma, wake up!
+do! do!"
+
+"Is she dead?" asked Miss Ludington, in horrified accents.
+
+"I don't know; I fear so. I warned her; I told her it would come. But she
+would do it," cried the doctor incoherently, as he tried to feel her
+pulse with one hand while he tore at the fastenings of her dress with the
+other. He set Paul at work chafing the hands of the unconscious woman,
+while Miss Ludington sprinkled her face and chest with ice-water from a
+small pitcher that stood in a corner of the cabinet, and the doctor
+himself endeavoured in vain to force some of the contents of a vial
+through her clenched teeth. "It is of no use," he said, finally; "she is
+past help--she is dead!"
+
+At this Miss Ludington and Paul stood aside, and Alta, throwing herself
+upon her mother's form, burst into an agony of tears. "She was all I
+had," she sobbed.
+
+"Had Mrs. Legrand friends?" asked Miss Ludington, conscience-stricken
+with the thought that she had indirectly been in part responsible for
+this terrible event.
+
+"She had friends who will look after Alta," said Dr. Hull.
+
+Their assistance being no longer needed, Miss Ludington and Paul turned
+from the sad scene and stepped forth from the cabinet into the back
+parlour.
+
+The tragedy which they had just witnessed had to a great extent driven
+from their thoughts the events of the seance which it had broken off so
+abruptly. The impression left on their minds was that the spirit-form of
+Ida had vanished in the blinding flood of gas-light through which they
+had groped their way to the cabinet on hearing the death-rattle of the
+medium.
+
+But now in the remotest corner of the room, towards which they had last
+seen the form of the spirit drifting, there stood a young girl. She was
+bending forward, shielding her eyes with her right hand from the flaring
+gas, as she peered curiously about the room, her whole attitude
+expressive of complete bewilderment.
+
+It was Ida; but what a change had passed upon her! This was no pale
+spirit, counterfeiting for a few brief moments, with the aid of darkness,
+the semblance of mortal flesh, but an unmistakable daughter of earth. Her
+bosom was palpitating with agitation, and, instead of the lofty serenity
+of a spirit, her eyes expressed the trouble of a perplexed girl who is
+fast becoming frightened.
+
+As Paul and Miss Ludington stepped forth from the cabinet she fixed upon
+them a pair of questioning eyes. There was not a particle of recognition
+in their expression. Presently she spoke. Her voice was a mezzo-soprano,
+low and sweet, but just now sharpened by an accent of apprehension.
+
+"Where am I?" she asked.
+
+After a moment, during which their brains reeled with an amazement so
+utter that they doubted the evidence of their senses--doubted even their
+own existence and identities, there had simultaneously flashed over the
+minds of Paul and Miss Ludington the explanation of what they beheld.
+
+The prodigy, the theoretical possibility of which they had discussed
+after the seance of the week before, and scarcely thought of since, had
+come to pass. Dr. Hull had proved wrong, and Paul had proved right. A
+medium had died during a materialization, and the materialized spirit had
+succeeded to her vitality, and was alive as one of them.
+
+It was no longer the spirit of Ida, knowing them by a spirit's intuition,
+which was before them, but the girl Ida Ludington, whose curious,
+unrecognizing glance testified to her ignorance of aught which the Hilton
+school-girl of forty years ago had not known.
+
+It was with an inexpressible throb of exultation, after the stupor of
+their first momentary astonishment, that they comprehended the miracle by
+which in the moment when the hope of ever beholding Ida again had seemed
+taken from them, had restored her not only to their eyes, but to life.
+But how should they accost her, how make themselves known to her, how go
+about even to answer the question she had asked without terrifying her
+with new and deeper mysteries?
+
+While they stood dumb, with hearts yearning toward her, but powerless to
+think of words with which to address her, Dr. Hull, hearing the sound of
+her voice, stepped out from the cabinet. At the sight of Ida he started
+back astounded, and Paul heard him exclaim under his breath, "I never
+thought of this"
+
+Then he laid his hand on Paul's arm and said, in an agitated whisper,
+"You were right. It has happened as you said. My God, what can we say to
+her?"
+
+Meanwhile, Ida was evidently becoming much alarmed at the strange looks
+bent upon her. "Perhaps, sir," she said, addressing Dr. Hull, with an
+appealing accent, "you will tell me how I came in this place?"
+
+Then ensued an extraordinary scene of explanation, in which, seconding
+one another's efforts, striving to hit upon simpler analogies, plainer
+terms, Paul the doctor, and Miss Ludington sought to make clear to this
+waif from eternity, so strangely stranded on the shores of Time, the
+conditions and circumstances under which she had resumed an earthly
+existence.
+
+For a while she only grew more terrified at their explanations, appearing
+to find them totally unintelligible, and, though her fears were gradually
+dissipated by the tenderness of their demeanour, her bewilderment seemed
+to increase. For a long time she continued to turn her face, with a
+pathetic expression of mental endeavour, from one to another, as they
+addressed her, only to shake her head slowly and sadly at last.
+
+"I seem to have lost myself," she said, pressing her hand to her
+forehead. "I do not understand anything you say."
+
+"It is a hard matter to understand," replied Dr. Hull. "Understanding
+will come later. Meanwhile, look in at the door of this room and you will
+see the body of the woman to whose life you have succeeded. Then you will
+believe us though you do not understand us."
+
+As he spoke he indicated the door of the cabinet.
+
+Ida stepped thither and looked in, recoiling with a sharp cry of horror.
+The terror in her face was piteous, and in a moment Miss Ludington was at
+her side, supporting and soothing her. Sobbing and trembling Ida
+submitted unresistingly to her ministrations, and even rested her head on
+Miss Ludington's shoulder.
+
+The golden hair brushed the grey locks; the full bosom heaved against the
+shrunken breast of age; the wrinkled, scarred, and sallow face of the old
+woman touched the rounded cheek of the girl.
+
+Fully as Paul believed that he had realized the essential and eternal
+distinction between the successive persons who constitute an
+individuality, he grew dizzy with the sheer wonder of the spectacle as he
+saw age thus consoling youth, and reflected upon the relation of these
+two persons to each other.
+
+Presently Ida raised her head and said, "It may be as you say. My mind is
+all confused. I cannot think now. Perhaps I shall understand it better
+after a while."
+
+"If you will come home with me now," said Miss Ludington, "before you
+sleep I will convince you what we are to each other. Will you come with
+me?"
+
+"Oh, yes!" exclaimed the girl. "Let us go. Let us leave this awful
+place;" and she glanced with a shudder at the door of the cabinet.
+
+A few moments later the house of death had been left behind, and Miss
+Ludington's carriage, with its three passengers was rolling homewards.
+
+Before leaving, Miss Ludington had told Dr. Hull that he might command
+her so far as any pecuniary assistance should be needed either with
+reference to the funeral or in connection with providing for Alta. She
+said that it would be a relief to her to be allowed to do anything she
+could. Dr. Hull thanked her and said that, as Mrs. Legrand had friends in
+the city, it would probably be unnecessary to trouble her. If for no
+other purpose, however, he said that he should possibly communicate with
+her hereafter with a view to informing himself as to the future of the
+young lady who had that night assumed the earth-life which his dear
+friend, Mrs. Legrand, had laid aside.
+
+It was an incident of this extraordinary situation that Miss Ludington
+found herself at disadvantage even in expressing the formal condolence
+she proffered. With Ida before her eyes it was impossible that she should
+honestly profess to deplore the event, however tragical, which had
+brought her back to earth. As for Paul he said nothing at all.
+
+The rattling of the wheels on the stony pavement was enough of itself to
+make conversation difficult in the carriage; even if it would otherwise
+have flowed easily in a company so strangely assorted. As the light of
+the street lamps from time to time flashed in at the windows Paul saw
+that Ida's face continued to wear the look of helpless daze which it had
+assumed from the moment that the sight of the dead woman in the cabinet
+had convinced her that she could not trust her own knowledge as to the
+relations of those about her.
+
+But when at last the carriage rolled through the gates of Miss
+Ludington's estate, and the houses of the mimic village began to glance
+by, her manner instantly changed. With an exclamation of joyful surprise,
+she put her head out at the window, and then looking back at them, cried,
+delightedly, "Why it's Hilton! You have brought me home! There's our
+house!" No sooner had she alighted than she ran up the walk to the door,
+and tried to open it. Paul, hurrying after, unlocked it, and she burst
+in, while he and Miss Ludington followed her, wondering.
+
+The servants had gone to bed, leaving the lower part of the house dimly
+lighted. Ida hurried on ahead from room to room with the confident step
+of one whose feet knew every turning. It was evident that she needed no
+one to introduce her there.
+
+When Miss Ludington and Paul followed her into the sitting-room, she was
+standing before her own picture in an attitude of utter astonishment.
+
+"Where did they get that picture of me?" she demanded. "I never had a
+picture painted."
+
+For a few moments there was no reply. Those she addressed were engrossed
+in comparing the portrait with its original. The resemblance was striking
+enough, but it was no wonder that after once seeing the living Ida, Paul
+had found the canvas stiff and hard and lifeless.
+
+"No," said Miss Ludington, "you never had a picture painted. It was not
+till many years after you had left the world that this picture was
+painted. It was enlarged from this portrait of you. Do you remember it?"
+and taking the locket containing the ivory portrait of Ida from her neck
+where she had worn it so many years, she opened and gave it to the girl.
+
+"Why, it is my ivory portrait!" exclaimed Ida. "How did you come by it?
+What do you mean about my leaving the world? Something strange has
+happened to me, I know, but did I die? I don't remember dying. Oh, can't
+somebody explain what has happened to me?"
+
+The dazed look which had disappeared from her face since her recognition
+of the village and the homestead had come back, and her last words were a
+bitter cry that went to the hearts of the listeners.
+
+Now, all the time they had been in the carriage, Paul had been trying to
+think of some mode of setting her relationship to Miss Ludington in a
+light so clear that she must comprehend it, for it was evident that the
+confused explanations at Mrs. Legrand's had availed little, if anything,
+to that end. Unless this could be done she seemed likely to remain
+indefinitely in this dazed mental state, which must be so exquisitely
+painful to her, and was scarcely less so to them.
+
+"If you will listen to me patiently," he said, "I will try to explain.
+You know that some strange thing has happened to you, and you must expect
+to find the explanation as strange as the thing itself; but it is not
+hard to understand."
+
+Ida's eyes were fixed on him with the expression of one listening for her
+life.
+
+"Do you remember being a little girl of nine or ten years old?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, yes!" she answered. "I remember that perfectly well."
+
+"You are now a young woman," he went on. "Where is that little girl whom
+you remember? What has become of her?"
+
+"Why, I don't know," replied Ida. "I suppose she is somewhere in me."
+
+"But you don't look like a little girl, or think or act or feel like one.
+How can she be in you?"
+
+"Where else could she be?" replied Ida.
+
+"Oh, there is no lack of room for her," said Paul; "the universe is big
+enough for all the souls that ever lived in it. Suppose, now, you
+believed her to be still alive as a spirit, just as she was, still alive
+somewhere in the land of spirits, not transformed into the young lady
+that you are at all, you understand, for that would only be another way
+of saying that she was dead, but just as she was, a child, with a child's
+loves, a child's thoughts, a child's feelings, and a child's face--can
+you suppose such a thing, just as an effort of imagination?"
+
+"Oh, yes!" said Ida; "I can suppose that."
+
+"Well, then," said Paul, "suppose also that you remembered this little
+girl very tenderly, and longed to look on her face again, although
+knowing that she was a spirit now. Suppose that you went to a woman
+having a mysterious power to call up the spirits of the departed, and
+suppose that she called up the spirit of this child-self of yours, and
+that you recognized it, and suppose that just at that moment the woman
+died, and her earthly life was transferred to the spirit of the child, so
+that instead of being a spirit, she became again a living child, but
+unable to recognize you who loved her so well, because when she lived on
+earth, you, of course, had not yet come into existence. Suppose you
+brought this child home with you----"
+
+"What do you mean?" interrupted Ida, with dilating eyes. "Am I----"
+
+"You are to that woman," broke in Paul, indicating Miss Ludington, "what
+the child would have been to you. You are bound to her by the same tie by
+which that little girl would have been bound to you. She remembers and
+loves you as you would remember and love that child; but you do not know
+her any more than that child would know you. You both share the name of
+Ida Ludington, according to the usage of men as to names; but I think
+there is no danger of your being confounded with each other, either in
+your own eyes or those of lookers-on."
+
+Ida had at last comprehended. The piercing look, expressive of mingled
+attraction and repulsion, which she fixed upon Miss Ludington, left no
+doubt of that. It implied alarm, mistrust, and something that was almost
+defiance, yet with hints of a possible tenderness.
+
+It was such a look as a daughter, stolen from her cradle and grown to
+maidenhood among strangers, might fix upon the woman claiming to be her
+mother, except that not only was Miss Ludington a stranger to Ida, but
+the relation which she claimed to sustain to her was one that had never
+before been realized between living persons on earth, however it might
+be, in heaven.
+
+"Do you understand?" said Paul.
+
+"I--think--I--do. But how--strange--it is!" she replied, in lingering
+tones, her gaze continuing to rest, as if fascinated, upon Miss
+Ludington.
+
+The latter's face expressed a great elation, an impassioned tenderness
+held in check through fear of terrifying its object.
+
+"I do not wonder it seems strange," she said, very softly. "You have yet
+no evidence as to who I am. I remember you--oh, how well!--but you cannot
+remember me, nor is there any instinct answering to memory by which you
+can recognize me. You have a right to require that I should prove that I
+am what I claim to be; that I am also Ida Ludington; that I am your later
+self. Do not fear, my darling. I shall be able to convince you very
+soon."
+
+She made Ida sit down, and then went to an ancient secretary, that stood
+in a corner of the room, and unlocked a drawer, the key to which she
+always carried on her person.
+
+Paul remembered from the time he was a little boy seeing her open this
+drawer on Sunday afternoons and cry over the keepsakes which it
+contained.
+
+She took out now a bundle of letters, a piece of ribbon, a locket, a
+bunch of faded flowers, and a few other trifles, and brought them to Ida.
+
+Paul left the room on tiptoe. This was a scene where a third person, one
+might almost say a second person, would be an interloper.
+
+When, a long time after, he returned, Miss Ludington was sitting in the
+chair where Ida had been sitting, smiling and crying, and the girl, with
+eyes that shone like stars, was bending over her, and kissing the tears
+away.
+
+The night was now almost spent, and the early dawn of midsummer, peering
+through the windows, and already dimming the lights, warned them that the
+day would soon be at hand.
+
+"You shall have your own bedroom," said Miss Ludington. The face of the
+old lady was flushed, and her high-pitched and tremulous voice betrayed
+an exhilaration like that of intoxication. "You will excuse me for having
+cluttered it up with my things; to-morrow I will take them away. You see
+I had not dared hope you would come back to me. I had expected to go to
+you."
+
+"I and you--you and I." The girl repeated the words after her, slowly, as
+if trying to grasp their full meaning as she uttered them. Then a sudden
+terror leaped into her eyes, and she cried shudderingly: "Oh, how strange
+it is!"
+
+"You do not doubt it? You do not doubt it still?" exclaimed Miss
+Ludington, in anguished tones.
+
+"No, no!" said the girl, recovering herself with an evident effort. "I
+cannot doubt it. I do not," and she threw her aims about Miss Ludington's
+neck in an embrace in which, nevertheless, a subtle shrinking still
+mingled with the impulse of tenderness which had overcome it.
+
+When presently Miss Ludington and Ida went upstairs together, the latter,
+with eager, unhesitating step, led the way through a complexity of
+roundabout passages, and past many other doors, to that of the chamber
+which had been the common possession of the girl and the woman. Miss
+Ludington followed her, wondering, yet not wondering.
+
+"It seems so strange to see you so familiar with this house," she said,
+with a little hysterical laugh, "and yet, of course, I know it is not
+strange."
+
+"No," replied the girl, looking at her with a certain astonishment, "I
+should think not. It would be strange, indeed, if I were not familiar
+here. The only strange thing is to feel that I am not at home here, that
+I am a guest in this house."
+
+"You are not a guest," exclaimed Miss Ludington, hurriedly, for she saw
+the dazed look coming again into the girl's eyes. "You shall be mistress
+here. Paul and I ask nothing better than to be your servants."
+
+To pass from the waking to the dreaming state is in general to exchange a
+prosaic and matter-of-fact world for one of fantastic improbabilities;
+but it is safe to assume that the three persons who fell asleep beneath
+Miss Ludington's roof that morning, just as the birds began to twitter,
+encountered in dreamland no experiences so strange as those which they
+had passed through with their eyes open the previous evening.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+
+The day following, Paul was downstairs before either Ida or Miss
+Ludington. He was sitting on the piazza, which was connected with the
+sitting-room by low windows opening like doors, when he heard a scream,
+and Ellen, the housemaid, who had been busy in the sitting-room, ran out
+upon the piazza with a face like a sheet.
+
+"What's the matter?" he demanded.
+
+"Sure I saw a ghost!" gasped Ellen. "I was on a chair dusting the
+picture, as I always does mornings, an' I looked up, an' there in the
+door stood the very same girl that's in the picture, kind of smiling
+like. And so I give a yell an' run."
+
+As she spoke Ida stepped out upon the piazza, and precipitately
+sheltering herself behind Paul, Ellen whispered, "Sure there she is now!"
+
+On seeing that, instead of sharing her terror, he cordially greeted the
+ghost, the girl's face showed such comical bewilderment that Ida smiled
+and Paul laughed outright.
+
+"This is no ghost, Ellen. This lady is Miss Ida Ludington, a relative of
+Miss Ludington's, who came to live here last night."
+
+"I hope ye'll not mind me takin' ye for a ghost, miss," said Ellen,
+confusedly; "but sure ye are the livin' image of the picture, and me not
+knowin' anybody was in the house more than the family;" and she
+disappeared to tell her story in the kitchen.
+
+Ida's appearance was noticeably calmer than the night before. There was,
+indeed, no indication of excitement in her manner. Paul inquired how she
+had slept.
+
+"I should think you might have had strange dreams," he said.
+
+"I did not dream at all. I slept soundly," she replied. "But this morning
+when I woke up and recognized the familiar features of the room I have
+always slept in--the same books, the same pictures, the furniture just as
+ever--I had to sit down a long time to collect my thoughts and remember
+what had happened. I could remember it well enough, but to realize it was
+very hard. And then, when I went to the window and looked out and saw the
+meeting-house and the school-house and the neighbours' houses, just where
+I have seen them from that window all my life since I was a baby, I had
+to sit down and think it all over, again before I could believe that I
+was not in Hilton, and last night all a dream."
+
+She spoke in a low, even tone, which was so evidently the result of an
+effort at self-control, that it impressed Paul more than any display of
+mental perturbation would have done.
+
+At this moment Miss Ludington appeared on the piazza with a white,
+excited face, which, however, as soon as she saw Ida, became all smiles.
+
+She had scarcely slept at all. The thought had kept her awake that Ida
+might vanish as mysteriously as she had come, and be gone at morning.
+From sheer weariness, however, she had at last fallen into a doze. On
+awaking she had gone to call Ida, and finding her chamber empty, had
+hurried downstairs full of apprehension.
+
+Immediately after breakfast, Miss Ludington, to whom Ellen's mistake; if
+mistake it could be called, had been related, took Ida upstairs, land
+made her exchange her white dress of the fashion of half a century before
+for one of her own, in order that her appearance might excite less remark
+among the servants pending the obtaining of a suitable wardrobe from the
+city.
+
+There was another consideration which made the change of costume not only
+desirable, but necessary.
+
+Ida's dress, which had not seemed the night before, to casual
+examination, to differ from other cloth, had begun to crumble away in a
+very curious manner. The texture seemed strangely brittle and
+strengthless. It fell apart at a touch, and was reduced to a fine powder
+under the pressure of the fingers. She could not possibly have worn it
+even one day.
+
+The dress of Miss Ludington's, for which she exchanged it, had been made
+for that lady when considerably stouter than at present, but was with
+difficulty enlarged sufficiently for the full figure of the girl. Like
+all but the latest of Miss Ludington's dresses, it was of deepest black,
+and, strikingly beautiful as Ida had been in white, the funereal hue set
+off the delicacy of her complexion, the pure expression of her face, and
+the golden lustre of her hair, like fresh revelations.
+
+Paul was left pretty much to himself during the day. A large part of it
+was spent by the ladies in an upstairs chamber, which Miss Ludington had
+devoted to a collection of mementoes of the successive periods of her
+life from infancy.
+
+"Come," she had said to Ida, "I want to introduce you to the rest of the
+family. I want to make you acquainted with the other Miss Ludingtons who
+have borne the name between your time and mine."
+
+Having been an only child, Miss Ludington's garments, toys, school-books,
+and other belongings had not been handed down to younger brothers and
+sisters, and eventually to destruction. It had been an easy matter to
+preserve them, and, consequently, the collection was large and curious,
+including samples of the wardrobe appertaining to every epoch, from the
+swaddling-clothes of the infant to a black gown of the last year.
+
+After the period of youth, however, which Ida represented, the number and
+interest of the mementoes rapidly decreased, and for many years had
+consisted of nothing more than a few dresses and a collection of
+photographs, one or two for each year, arranged in order. They numbered
+not less than fifty in all and covered thirty-seven years, from a
+daguerreotype of Miss Ludington at the age of twenty-five to a photograph
+taken the last month. Between these two pictures there was not enough
+resemblance to suggest to a casual observer that they were pictures of
+the same individual.
+
+To trace the gradual process of change from year to year during the
+intervening period, was an employment which never lost its pensive
+fascination for Miss Ludington. For each of these faces, with their so
+various expressions, represented a person possessing a peculiar identity
+and certain incommunicable qualities--a person a little different from
+any one of those who came before or after her, and from any other person
+who ever lived on earth.
+
+As now the grey head and the golden head bent together over one picture
+after another, Miss Ludington related all she could remember of the
+history and personal peculiarities of the original.
+
+"There is, really, not much to say about them," she said. "They lived
+very quiet, uneventful lives, and to anybody but us would, doubtless,
+seem entirely uninteresting persons. All wore black dresses, and had sad
+faces, and all found in their thoughts of you the source at once of their
+only consolation and their keenest sorrow. For they fully believed--think
+of it!--fully and unquestionably believed that you were dead; more
+hopelessly dead than if you were in your grave, dead, with no possibility
+of resurrection."
+
+"This is the one," she said, presently, as she took up the picture of a
+woman of thirty-five, "who had the fortune left to her, which has come
+down to me. I want you to like her. Next to you I think more of her than
+I do of any of the rest. It was she who cut loose from the old life at
+Hilton which had become so sour and sad, and built this new Hilton here,
+where life has been so much calmer, and, on the whole, happier, than it
+had got to be at home. It was she who had the portrait of you painted
+which is downstairs."
+
+Ida took up a picture of the Miss Ludington of twenty-six or seven.
+
+"Tell me something about her," she said. "What kind of a person was she?"
+
+The elder woman's manner, when she saw what picture it was that Ida had
+taken up, betrayed a marked embarrassment, and first she made no reply.
+
+Noticing her confusion and hesitation, Ida said, softly, "Don't tell me
+if it is anything you don't like to speak of. I do not care to know it."
+
+"I will tell you," replied Miss Ludington, with determination. "You have
+as good a right to know as I have. She cannot blame me for telling you.
+She knows your secrets as I do, and you have a right to know hers. She
+had a little escapade. You must not be too hard on her. It was the
+outcome of the desperate dulness and life-weariness that came over her
+with the knowledge that youth and its joys were past, leaving nothing in
+their place. The calm and resignation to a lonely existence, empty of all
+that human hearts desire, which came in after-years, she could not yet
+command. Oh, if you could imagine, as I remember, the bitterness of that
+period, you would not be too hard upon her for anything she might have
+done I But, really, it was nothing very bad. People would not call it so,
+even if it had ever become known." And then, with blushing cheeks and
+shamed eyes, Miss Ludington poured into Ida's ears a story that would
+have disappointed any one expectant of a highly sensational disclosure,
+but which stood out in her memory as the one indiscretion of an otherwise
+blameless life. That she imparted it to Ida was the most striking
+evidence she could have given of the absolute community of interests
+which she recognized as existing between them. She was greatly comforted
+when Ida, instead of appearing shocked, declared that she sympathized
+with the culprit more than she blamed her, and that her misconduct was
+venial.
+
+"I suppose," said Miss Ludington, "every one, in looking back upon their
+past selves, sees some whom they condemn, and, perhaps, despise, and
+others whom they admire and sympathize with. And I confess I sympathize
+with this poor girl. Those I don't like are some whom I remember to have
+lacked softness of heart, to have been sour and ungenerous; these, for
+instance," indicating certain pictures. "But it is hardly fair," she
+added, laughing, "for us two to get together and abuse the rest of the
+family, who, no doubt, if they were present, would have something to say
+for themselves, and some criticisms to offer on us--that is, on me. None
+of them would criticize you. You were the darling and pride of us all."
+
+"If I do say it," Miss Ludington presently resumed, "we have been a very
+respectable lot on the whole. The Ida Ludingtons have been good babies,
+good children, good girls, good women, and, I hope, will prove to have
+been respectable old women, In the spirit land, when we all meet
+together, there will be no black sheep among us, nor even anybody that we
+shall need to send to Coventry: But I do not see why special affinities
+should not assert themselves there as here, and Cliques form among us.
+You will belong to them all, of course, but next to you I know that I
+shall be fondest of that poor girl I told you about, of her and of the
+Ida Ludington who built this new Hilton thirty years ago."
+
+"And now," she said, as they finished looking over the pictures and
+talking about them, "I have introduced you to all who have borne our name
+from your day to mine. As to those who came before you, the baby Ida and
+the child Ida, you remember them even better than I do, no doubt. I would
+give anything if I had their pictures, but the blessed art of photography
+was not then invented. These keepsakes are all I have of them." And
+taking Ida over to another part of the room, she showed her a cradle,
+several battered dolls, fragments of a child's pewter tea-set, and a
+miscellaneous collection of toys.
+
+They took up and handled tenderly pairs of little shoes, socks nearly as
+long as one's fingers, and baby dresses scarcely bigger than a man's
+mittens. Lying near were the shoes, and gowns, and hoods, now grown a
+little larger, of the child, with the coral necklace, and first precious
+ornaments, the dog's-eared spelling-books, and the rewards of merit,
+testifying of early school-days.
+
+"I can barely remember the baby and this little girl," said Miss
+Ludington, "but I fancy they will be the pets of all the rest of us up
+there, don't you?"
+
+After Miss Ludington had shown Ida all the contents of the room, and they
+were about to leave it, she said to the girl, "And now what do you think
+of us other Ida Ludingtons, who have followed you, present company not
+excepted? Confess that you think the acquaintances I have introduced to
+you were scarcely worth the making. You need not hesitate to say so; it
+is quite my own opinion. We have amounted to very little, taken
+altogether."
+
+"Oh, no!" said Ida, quietly; "I do not think that; I would not say that;
+but your lives have all been so different from what I have always dreamed
+my life as a woman would be."
+
+"You have a right to be disappointed in us," said Miss Ludington. "We
+have, indeed, not turned out as you expected--as you had a right to
+expect." But Ida would not admit in any derogatory sense that she was
+disappointed.
+
+"You are sweeter, and kinder, and gentler, than I supposed I ever could
+be," she said; "but you see, I thought, of course, I should be married,
+and have children, and that all would be so different from what it has
+been; but not that I should ever be better than you are, or nearly so
+sweet. Oh, no!"
+
+"Thank you, my darling!" said the old lady, kissing Ida's hand, as if she
+were a queen who had conferred an order of merit upon her. "I think that
+to have to confess to their youthful selves their failures to fulfil
+their expectations must be the hardest part of the Day of Judgment for
+old folks who have wasted their lives. All will not find so gentle a
+judge as mine."
+
+Her eyes were full of happy tears.
+
+In the latter part of the afternoon they took a walk in the village, and
+Ida pressed her companion with a multitude of inquiries about the members
+of the families which had occupied the houses, forty and fifty years
+before, and what had since become of them; to reply to which taxed Miss
+Ludington's memory not a little.
+
+As they came to the schoolhouse Ida ran on ahead, and when her companion
+entered, was already seated in Miss Ludington's old seat. Nothing,
+perhaps, could have brought home to the latter more strongly the nature
+of her relationship to Ida than to stand beside her as she sat in that
+seat.
+
+As they fell to talking of the scholars who had sat here and there, Miss
+Ludington began gently to banter Ida about this and that boyish
+sweetheart, and divers episodes connected with such topics.
+
+"This is unfair," said the girl, smiling. "It is a very one-sided
+arrangement that you should remember all my secrets while I know none of
+yours. It is as if you had stolen my private journal."
+
+A subtle coyness, an air of constraint, and of shy, curious observance,
+which had marked Ida's manner toward Miss Ludington in the early part of
+the day, had noticeably given way under the influence of the latter's
+blithe affectionateness, and it was with arms about each other's waists
+that the two sauntered back to the house, in the twilight.
+
+"I scarcely know what to call you," said Ida. "For me to call you Ida, as
+you call me, would be and, besides, you are so much older than I it would
+seem hardly fitting."
+
+Miss Ludington laughed softly.
+
+"On the score of respect, my darling, you need not hesitate," she said,
+"for it is you who are the elder Miss Ludington, and I the younger, in
+spite of my white hair. You are forty years older than I. It is I who owe
+you the respect due to years. You are right, however; it would be
+confusing for us to call each other by the same name, and still there is
+no word in human language that truly describes our relationship."
+
+"It seems to me it is more like that of sisters than any other,"
+suggested Ida, with a certain timidity.
+
+Miss Ludington reflected a moment, and then exclaimed, delightedly:
+
+"Yes, we will call each other sister, for our relation is certainly a
+kind of sisterhood. We are, like sisters, not connected directly, but
+indirectly, though our relation to our common individuality, as if we
+were fruit borne by the same tree in different seasons. To be sure," she
+added regarding her blooming companion with a smile of tender admiration,
+"we can scarcely be said to look as much alike as sisters commonly do,
+but that is because there is not often a difference of more than forty
+years in the ages of sisters."
+
+And so it was agreed that they should call each other sister.
+
+Although it was but one day that these two had been known to each other,
+yet so naturally had Ida seemed drawn towards Miss Ludington, and so
+spontaneous had been the outflow of the latter's long-stored tenderness
+toward the girl, that they were already like persons who have been bosom
+friends and confidants for years.
+
+In this wonderfully rapid growth of a close and tender intimacy, Miss
+Ludington exultingly recognized the heart's testimony to the reality of
+the mystic tie between them.
+
+So fit and natural had the presence of Ida under her roof already come to
+seem, that she found herself half-forgetting, at times, the astounding
+and tragic circumstances to which it was due.
+
+Absorbed in the wonder and happiness of her own experience, Miss
+Ludington had barely given a thought to Paul during the day. Having been
+constantly with Ida she had not, indeed, seen him, save at table, and had
+failed to take note of his wobegone appearance. At any other time it
+would have aroused her solicitude; but it was not strange that on this
+day she should have had no thought save for herself and her other self.
+
+It had, indeed, been a day of strangely mingled emotions for Paul.
+
+Supposing a lover were separated from his mistress, and that the
+privilege of being with her, and spending his days in sight of her, were
+offered him by some fairy, but only on condition that all memory of him
+should be blotted from her mind, and that she should see in him merely a
+stranger--is it probable, however great might be the desire of such a
+lover to behold his mistress, that he would consent to gratify it on
+these terms?
+
+But it was with Paul as if he had done just this. That the sight of his
+idol should have fallen to his lot on earth; that he should hear the
+sound of her voice, and breathe the same air with her, was, on the one
+hand, a felicity so undreamed of, a fortune so amazing, that he sometimes
+wondered how he could enjoy it, and still retain his senses.
+
+But when he met her, and she returned his impassioned look with a mere
+smile of civil recognition; when he spoke to her, and she answered him in
+a tone of conventional politeness--he found it more than he could bear.
+
+The eyes of her picture were kinder than hers. He had, at least, been
+able to comfort himself with the belief that, as a spirit, she had known
+of his love, and accepted it. Now, by her incarnation, while his eyes had
+gained their desire, his heart had lost its consolation.
+
+His condition of mind rapidly became desperate. He could not bear to be
+in Ida's presence. Her friendly, formal accent was unendurable to him.
+Their blank, unrecognizing expression, as they rested on him in mere
+kindliness, made her lovely eyes awful to him as a Gorgon's.
+
+In the early evening he found Miss Ludington alone, and broke out to her:
+
+"For God's sake, can't you help me? I shall go mad if you don't!"
+
+"Why, what do you mean?" she exclaimed, in astonishment.
+"Don't you see?" he cried. "She does not know me. I have lost her instead
+of finding her. I, who have loved her ever since I was a baby, am no more
+than a stranger to her. Can't you see how she looks at me? She has
+learned to know you, but I am a stranger to her."
+
+"But how could she know you, Paul? She did not know me till it was
+explained to her."
+
+"I know," he said. "I don't blame her, but at the same time I cannot
+stand it. Can't you help me with her? Can't you tell her how I have loved
+her, so that she may understand that at least?"
+
+"Poor Paul!" said Miss Ludington, soothingly. "In my own happiness I had
+almost forgotten you. But I can see how hard it must be for you. I will
+help you. I will tell her all the story. Oh, Paul! is she not beautiful?
+She will love you, I know she will love you when she hears it, and how
+happy you will be--happier than any man ever was! I will go to her now."
+
+And, leaving Paul vaguely encouraged by her confidence, she went to find
+Ida.
+
+She came upon her in the sitting-room, intently pondering the picture
+above the fireplace.
+
+"I want to tell you a love story, my sister,". she said.
+
+"Whose love story?" asked Ida.
+
+"Your own."
+
+"But I never had a love story or a lover. Nobody can possibly know that
+better than you do."
+
+"I will show you that you are mistaken," said Miss Ludington, smiling.
+"No one ever bad so fond or faithful a lover as yours. Sit down and I
+will tell you your own love story, for the strangest thing of all is that
+you do not know it yet."
+
+Beginning with Paul's baby fondness for her picture, she related to Ida
+the whole story of his love for her, which had grown with his growth,
+and, from a boyish sentiment, become the ruling passion of the man,
+blinding him to the charms of living women, and making him a monk for her
+sake.
+
+She described the effect upon him of the first suggestion that it might
+be possible to communicate with her spirit, and how her presence on earth
+was due to the enthusiasm with which he had insisted upon making the
+attempt.
+
+Then she asked Ida to imagine what must be the anguish of such a lover on
+finding that she did not know him--that he was nothing more than a
+stranger to her. She told her how, in his desperation, he had appealed to
+her to plead his case and to relate his story, that his mistress might at
+least know his love, though she might not be able to return it.
+
+Ida had listened at first in sheer wonder, but as Miss Ludington went on
+describing this great love, which all unseen she had inspired, to find
+awaiting her full-grown on her return to earth, her cheek began to flush,
+a soft smile played about her lips, and her eyes were fixed in tender
+reverie.
+
+"Tell him to come to me," she said, gently, as Miss Ludington finished.
+
+When Paul entered, Ida was alone, standing in the centre of the room.
+
+He threw himself at her feet, and lifted the hem of her dress to his
+lips.
+
+"Paul, my lover," she said softly.
+
+At this he seized her hand and covered it with kisses. She gently drew
+him to his feet. He heard her say, "Forgive me, Paul; I did not know."
+
+Her warm breath mingled with his, and she kissed him on the lips.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+
+In the days that followed, Ida was the object of a devotion on the part
+of Miss Ludington and Paul which it would be inadequate to describe as
+anything less than sheer idolatry. Her experience was such as a goddess's
+might be who should descend from heaven and take up her abode in bodily
+form among her worshippers, accepting in person the devotion previously
+lavished on her effigy.
+
+With Miss Ludington this devotion was the more intense as it was but a
+sublimed form of selfishness, like that of the mother's to her child,
+whom she feels to be a part, and the choicest part, of her own life. The
+instinct of maternity, never gratified in her by the possession of
+children, asserted itself toward this radiant girl, whose being was so
+much closer to hers than even a child's could be, whose life was so
+wonderfully her own and yet not her own, that, in loving her, self-love
+became transfigured and adorable. She could not have told whether the
+sense of their identity or their difference were the sweeter.
+
+Her delight in the girl's loveliness was a transcendent blending of a
+woman's pleasure in her own beauty and a lover's admiration of it. She
+had transferred to Ida all sense of personal identity excepting just
+enough to taste the joy of loving, admiring, and serving her.
+
+To wait upon her was her greatest happiness. There was no service so
+menial that she would not have been glad to perform it for her, and which
+she did not grudge the servants the privilege of rendering. The happiness
+which flooded her heart at this time was beyond description. It was not
+such a happiness as enabled her to imagine what that of heaven might be,
+but it was the happiness of heaven itself.
+
+As might be expected, the semi-sacredness attaching to Ida, as a being
+something more than earthly in the circumstances of her advent, lent a
+rare strain to Paul's passion.
+
+There is nothing sweeter to a lover than to feel that his mistress is of
+a higher nature and a finer quality than himself. With many lovers, no
+doubt, this feeling is but the delusion of a fond fancy, having no basis
+in any real superiority on the part of the loved one. But the mystery
+surrounding Ida would have tinged the devotion of the most prosaic lover
+with an unusual sentiment of awe.
+
+Paul compared himself with those fortunate youths of antiquity who were
+beloved by the goddesses of Olympus, and in whose hearts religious
+adoration and the passion of love blended in one emotion.
+
+Ever since that night when her heart had been melted by the story of his
+love, Ida had treated him with the graciousness which a maiden accords to
+an accepted lover. But far from claiming the privileges which he might
+apparently have enjoyed, it seemed to him presumption enough and
+happiness enough to kiss her dress, her sleeve, a tress of her hair, or,
+at most, her hand, and to dream of her lips.
+
+The dazed appearance, as of one doubtful of herself and all about her,
+which Ida had worn the night when she was brought home, had now wholly
+passed away. But a certain pensiveness remained. Her smiles were the
+smiles of affection not of gaiety, and there was always a shadow in her
+eyes. It was as if the recollection of the mystery from which her life
+had emerged were never absent from her mind.
+
+Still she took so much pleasure in her daily drives with Miss Ludington
+that the latter ordered a pony chaise for her special use, and when Paul
+arranged a croquet set on the village green, she permitted him to teach
+her the game, and even showed some interest in it.
+
+When the first dresses which had been ordered for her came home, she was
+delighted as any girl must have been, for they were the richest and most
+beautiful fabrics that money could buy; but Miss Ludington seemed, of the
+two, far the more pleased.
+
+For herself she had cared nothing for dress. In forty years she had not
+given a thought to personal adornment, but Ida's toilet became her most
+absorbing preoccupation. On her account she became a close student of the
+fashion-papers, and but for the girl's protests would have bought her a
+new dress at least every day.
+
+She would have liked Ida to change her costume a dozen times between
+morning and evening, and asked no better than to serve as her
+dressing-maid. To brush and braid her shining hair, stealthily kissing it
+the while; to array her in sheeny satins and airy muslins; to hang jewels
+upon her neck, and clasp bracelets upon her wrists, and to admire and
+caress the completed work of her hands, constituted an occupation which
+she would have liked to make perpetual.
+
+When Miss Ludington's mother had died she had left to her daughter, then
+a young girl, all her jewels, including a rather flue set of diamonds.
+When one day Miss Ludington took the gems from the box in which they had
+been hidden away for half a lifetime, and hung them upon Ida, saying,
+"These are yours, my sister," the girl protested, albeit with
+scintillating eyes, against the greatness of the gift.
+
+"Why, my darling, they are yours," replied Miss Ludington. "I am not
+making you a gift. It was to you that mother gave them. I only return you
+your own. When you left the world I inherited them from you, and now that
+you have come back I return them to you."
+
+And so the girl was fain to keep them.
+
+Thus it had come about that before Ida had been in the house a week it
+was no longer as a mystery, or, at least, as an awe-inspiring mystery,
+but as an ineffably dear and precious reality, that her presence was
+felt. Had a stranger chanced to come there on a visit, at that time, he
+would doubtless have been struck with the fact that a young girl was the
+central figure of the household, around whom its other members revolved;
+but it is probable that this fact, in itself not unparalleled in American
+households, would have seemed to such an observer sufficiently explained
+by the unusual gentleness and beauty of the girl herself. The necessity
+of a supernatural explanation certainly would not have occurred to him.
+
+The servants had been merely informed that Ida was a relative of Miss
+Ludington's, and though they were very curious as to what connection she
+might be, their speculations did not extend beyond the commonly
+recognized modes of relationship. The housekeeper, indeed, who had been
+in Miss Ludington's employ many years, and supposed she knew all about
+the family, thought it strange that she could recall no young lady
+relative answering to Ida's description. But as she found that her most
+ingenious efforts entirely failed to extract any information on the
+subject from Miss Ludington, Paul, or Ida herself, she was obliged, like
+the rest, to accept the bare fact that the new-comer was Miss Ida
+Ludington, and that she was somehow related to Miss Ludington; a fact
+speedily supplemented by the discovery that to please Miss Ida was the
+surest way to the favour of Miss Ludington and Mr. Paul.
+
+On that score, however, there was no need of any special inducement,
+Ida's sweet face, and gracious, considerate ways, having already made her
+a favourite with all who were attached to the household.
+
+It was ten days or a fortnight after Ida had been in the house that Miss
+Ludington received a letter from Dr. Hull, in which that gentleman said
+that he should do himself the honour of calling on her the following day.
+
+He said she might be interested to know that he had already received
+several communications from Mrs. Legrand, through mediums, in which she
+had declared herself well content to have died in demonstrating so great
+a truth as that immortality is not individual, but personal. She
+considered herself to be most fortunate in that her death had not been a
+barren one, as most deaths are; but that in dying, she had been permitted
+to become the second mother of another, and far brighter life than hers
+had been. She felt that she had made a grand barter for her own earthly
+existence, which had been so sick and weary.
+
+The bulk of Dr. Hull's letter, which was quite a long one, consisted of
+further quotations from Mrs. Legrand's communications.
+
+She said that she had been welcomed by a great multitude of spirits, who
+to her had owed the beginning of their recognition on earth, and that
+their joy over this discovery, which should bring consolation to many
+mournful mortals, as well as to themselves, was only equalled by their
+wonder that it had not been made years before. It appeared that, since
+intercourse between the two worlds had first begun, it had been the
+constant effort of the spirits to teach this truth to men; but the stupid
+refusal of the latter to comprehend had till now baffled every attempt.
+How it had been possible that men who had reached the point of believing
+in immortality at all should be content to rest in the inadequate and
+preposterous conception that it only attached to the latest phase of the
+individual, was the standing wonder of the spirit world.
+
+It was as if one should throw away the contents of a cup of wine, and
+carefully preserve the dregs in the bottom.
+
+That so loose an association of personalities as the individual, and
+those personalities so utterly diverse, no two of them even alive at the
+same time, should have impressed even the most casual observer as a unit
+of being--a single person--was accounted a marvel by the angels. If men
+had believed all the members of a family to have but one soul among them,
+their mistake would have been more excusable, for the members of a family
+are, at least, alive at the same time, while the persons of an individual
+are not even that.
+
+Dr. Hull said that he had gathered from Mrs. Legrand's communications
+that she had seen many things which would teach mortals not to grieve for
+their departed friends, as for shades exiled to a world of strangers. To
+such mourners she sent word that their own past selves, who have likewise
+vanished from the earth, are keeping their dear dead company in heaven.
+And far more congenial company to them are these past selves than their
+present selves would be, who, through years and changes since their
+separation, have often grown out of sympathy with the departed, as they
+will find when they shall meet them. The aged husband, who has mourned
+all his life the bride taken from him in girlhood, will find himself
+well-nigh a stranger to her, and his mourning to have been superfluous;
+for all these years his own former self, the husband of her youth, has
+borne her company.
+
+Dr. Hull said, in closing, that, as probably Miss Ludington would
+presume, his particular motive in making bold to break in upon her
+privacy was a desire, which he was sure she would not confound with
+vulgar curiosity, to see again the young lady who had succeeded to his
+friend's earthly life in so wonderful a manner, and to learn, what, if
+any, were the later developments in her case. He was preparing a book
+upon the subject, in which, of course without giving the true names, he
+intended to make the facts of the case known in the world. Its
+publication, he felt assured, would mark a new departure in spiritualism.
+
+Miss Ludington read the letter aloud to Ida and Paul, as all three sat
+together in the gloaming on the piazza. As Paul from time to time, during
+the reading, glanced at Ida he noticed that she kept her face averted.
+
+"I am glad," said Miss Ludington, as she finished the letter, "that Mrs.
+Legrand is happy. It is so hard to realize that about the dead. The
+feeling that, our happiness was purchased by her death has been the only
+cloud upon it. And yet it would be strange indeed if she were not happy.
+As she says, she did not die a barren death, but in giving birth. And it
+was no tiny infant's existence, of doubtful value, that she exchanged her
+life for, but a woman's in the fulness of her youth and beauty. Such a
+destiny as hers never fell to a mother before."
+
+"Never before," echoed Paul, rising to his feet in an access of
+enthusiasm; "but who shall say that it may not often fall to the lot of
+women in the ages to come, as the relations between the worlds of men and
+of spirits, become more fully known? The dark and unknown path that Ida
+trod that night back to our world will, doubtless, in future times,
+become a beaten and lighted way. This woman through whom she lives again
+did not die of her own choice; but I do not find it incredible that many
+women will hereafter be found willing and eager to die as she did, to
+bring back to earth the good, the wise, the heroic, and beloved. The
+world will never need to lose its heroes then, for there will never lack
+ardent and devoted women to contend for such crowns of motherhood."
+
+He stopped abruptly, for be had observed that Ida's face betrayed acute
+distress.
+
+"Forgive me," he said. "You do not like us to talk of this."
+
+"I think I do not," she replied, in a low voice, without looking up. "It
+affects me very strangely to think about it much. I would like to forget
+it if I could and feel that I am like other people."
+
+She had, in fact, shown a marked and increasing indisposition almost from
+the first to discuss the events of that wonderful night at Mrs.
+Legrand's. After having had the circumstances once fully explained to
+her, she had never since referred to them of her own accord.
+
+She apparently had the shrinking which any person, and especially a
+woman, would naturally have from the idea of being regarded as something
+abnormal and uncanny, and mingled with this was, perhaps, a certain
+sacred shamefacedness, at the thought that this most intimate and vital
+mystery of her second birth had been witnessed and was the subject of
+curious speculations.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+
+The ladies were out driving, the following afternoon, when Dr. Hull
+arrived, but Paul was at home. He brought out some cigars, and they made
+themselves comfortable on the piazza.
+
+Dr. Hull was full of questions about Ida? how she appeared; what
+relations had established themselves between Miss Ludington and her;
+whether she showed any memory whatever of her disembodied state; whether
+the knowledge of the mystery involving her seemed in any way to affect
+her spirits or temper, or to set her apart in her own estimation from
+others, with many other acute and carefully considered queries calculated
+to elicit the facts of her mental and spiritual condition?
+
+"There is one point," said the doctor, "about which I am particularly
+curious. How is it with her memory of her former life on earth? Does it
+break off suddenly, as if on some particular day or hour her spirit had
+made way for its successor, and passed away from earth?"
+
+"On the contrary," said Paul, "she has intimated, in talking over the
+past with Miss Ludington, that the memory of her life on earth is clear
+and precise during its earlier portions, but that toward the last it
+grows hazy and indistinct."
+
+"Exactly," broke in the doctor. "Just as if her personality had a little
+overlapped and melted at the edge into that which followed it. Yes, it is
+as I thought it might be. Youth, or childhood, or infancy, or any other
+epoch of life, does not abruptly cease and give place to another. Their
+souls are gradually withdrawn as the light is withdrawn from the sky at
+evening, and a space of twilight renders the transition from one to the
+other perceptible only in the result, not in the process. This I think is
+a view of the matter, that is corroborated by the testimony of our own
+consciousness, don't you, Mr. De Riemer?"
+
+"On the whole, yes," replied Paul. "And still, if she had said that the
+severing of her personality from that which succeeded it was sharp and
+clearly defined, so that up to a certain day, or even hour, her memory
+was full and distinct, and then became a blank, there are passages in my
+own experience, and I think in that of many persons, which her statement
+would have made comprehensible. I think that to many, perhaps to all
+persons of reflective turn of mind, there come days, even hours, when
+they feel that they have suddenly passed from one epoch of life into
+another. A voice says in their hearts with unmistakable clearness,
+'Yesterday I was young; to day I am young no longer.' There is also
+sometimes a day, I think, when the middle-aged man becomes suddenly aware
+that he is old. Who shall deny the truth of these intuitions, or say that
+it is not in that very day and hour that the spirit of youth or of
+maturity takes its flight?"
+
+"By the way," said Dr. Hull, "have you ever speculated on the probable
+number of the souls of an individual? It is an interesting question."
+
+"I suppose that the number may greatly differ in different Individuals,"
+replied Paul. "In individuals of many-sided minds and versatile
+dispositions, there are, perhaps, more distinct personalities than
+constitute an individual of less complex character. But how many in
+either case only God can tell. Who can say? It may be that with every
+breath which I expire a soul or spiritual impression of myself is sent
+forth. The universe is large enough even for that. Such may at least be
+the case in moments of special intensity, when we live, as we say, a year
+in an hour."
+
+They smoked on awhile in silence. Presently Paul said, "When the world
+comes to recognize the composite character of the individual, that it is
+composed of not one, but many persons, a new department will be added to
+ethics, relating to the duties of the successive selves of an individual
+to one another. It will be recognized, on the one hand, that it is the
+duty of a man to fulfil all reasonable obligations incurred by his past
+selves, on the same principle that a pious son fulfils the equitable
+obligations incurred by a parent. This duty is, indeed, recognized
+to-day, although not on the correct basis. As regards the ethical
+relation of a man to the selves who succeed him, a wholly new idea will
+be introduced. It will be seen that the duty of a man to lead a wise
+life, to be prudent, to make the most of his powers, to maintain a good
+name, is not a duty to himself, merely an enlightened selfishness, as it
+is now called, but a genuine form of altruism, a duty to others, as truly
+as if those others bore different names instead of succeeding to his
+name. It will be seen that a man's duty to his later selves is like the
+duty of a father to his helpless children: to provide for their
+inheritance, to see that he leaves them a sound body and a good name, if
+nothing more. It will be perceived that the man who is charitably called
+'his own worst enemy,' is not only no better, but worse, than if he were
+the enemy of his neighbours, because he is blasting coming lives that
+have a far nearer claim upon him than any neighbour can have.
+
+"There will arise, also, in that day, I fancy," said Paul, some rather
+delicate questions, as to how far a man may properly bind his future
+selves by pledges and engagements which he has no means of knowing will
+meet with their approval, and which may quite possibly prove intolerable
+yokes to them."
+
+"Ah!" exclaimed the doctor, "that is indeed an interesting point. And,
+meanwhile, I should say the intelligible discussion of these questions
+will involve a modification in grammatical usage. If we believe that our
+present selves are distinct persons from our past selves, it is
+manifestly improper to use the first person in speaking of our past
+selves. Either the third person must be used, or some new grammatical
+form invented."
+
+"Yes," said Paul. "If entire accuracy is sought the first person cannot
+be properly employed by any one in referring either to his past or his
+future selves, to what has been done or to what will be done by them."
+
+At this moment the carriage drew up before the house, and Paul helped the
+ladies out.
+
+Miss Ludington greeted Dr. Hull cordially, and stopped upon the piazza in
+hat and shawl to talk with him. But Ida merely bowed stiffly, with
+lowered eyes, and passed within.
+
+Before they were called to tea Paul found an opportunity to tell the
+doctor how sensitive Ida was to any discussion of the mystery connected
+with her, and to suggest that at table any direct reference to the
+subject should be avoided.
+
+The expression of disappointment on Dr. Hull's countenance seemed to
+indicate that he had anticipated thoroughly cross-questioning her in the
+interest of spiritual science; but he said that he would regard Paul's
+suggestion, and even admitted that it was, perhaps, natural she should
+feel as she did, although he had not anticipated it.
+
+At the table, therefore, Ida was spared any direct reference to herself
+as a phenomenon, and although Dr. Hull talked of nothing hut spiritualism
+and the immortality of past selves, it was in their broad and general
+aspects that the subjects were discussed.
+
+"Your nephew," he said to Miss Ludington, "has evidently given much time
+and profound thought to these matters; and although I am an old man, and
+have been more interested in the spiritual than the material universe for
+these many years, I was glad of an opportunity to sit at his feet this
+afternoon."
+
+Turning to Paul, he added, "What you were saying about the possibility
+that souls, or, at least, spiritual impressions, destined to eternity,
+are given forth by us constantly, as if at every breath, is wonderfully
+borne out in a passage from a communication I had from Mrs. Legrand
+yesterday, to which I meant to have alluded at the time you were
+speaking. She said that those who supposed that the spirit-land contained
+only one soul for every individual that had. ever lived had no conception
+of its vastness, and that the stream of souls constantly ascending is
+like a thick mist rising from all the earth. The phrase struck me as
+strangely strong, but I can conceive now how she might have come to use
+it.
+
+"What is your conjecture, or have you none at all," he added, after a
+moment's thought, still addressing Paul, "as to the relation which will
+exist in the spirit-land among the several souls of the same individual?"
+
+"It seems to me," said Paul, "that the souls of an individual, being
+contemporaneous over there, and all together in the eternal present, will
+be capable of blending in a unity which here on earth, where one is gone
+before another comes, is impossible. The result of such a blending would
+be a being which, in stead of shining with the single ray of a soul on
+earth, would blaze from a hundred facets simultaneously. The word
+"individual," as applied here on earth, is a misuse of language. It is
+absurd to call that an individual which every hour divides. The, earthly
+stage of human life is so small that there is room for but one of the
+persons of an individual upon it at one time. The past and future selves
+have to wait in the side scenes. But over there the stage is larger.
+There will be room for all at once. The idea of an individual, all whose
+personalities are contemporaneous, may there be realized, and such an
+individual would be, by any earthly measurement, a god.
+
+"But there are many individuals," he pursued after a pause, "of which we
+cannot imagine a blending of the successive persons to be possible.
+There, for instance, are cases where there exist radical and bitter
+oppositions and differences of character, and propensity between the
+youth and the manhood of the individual. In the case of such ill-assorted
+personalities a divorce _ex vinculo individui_ may be the only remedy;
+and, possibly, the parties to it maybe sent back to earth, to take their
+chances of finding more congenial companions."
+
+Ida had not said a word during the time they had sat at table. She had,
+indeed, scarcely lifted her eyes from her plate.
+
+As they rose she challenged Paul to a game at croquet, for which the
+twilight left ample opportunity.
+
+Miss Ludington and Dr. Hull sat upon the piazza in full view of the
+players.
+
+"What do you call her?" he asked, abruptly, after a pause in their
+conversation.
+
+"Why, we call her Ida, of course," replied Miss Ludington, with some
+surprise. "What else could we call her? Is not her name Ida Ludington?"
+
+"On my own account," said Dr. Hull, "I should not have needed to ask you,
+because I am acquainted with the circumstances of the reassumption of her
+earthly life and name, but how would you introduce her to one who was not
+so acquainted--to any one, in fact, besides yourself, your nephew, and
+myself?"
+
+"In the same way, I suppose," replied Miss Ludington.
+
+"Precisely," said the doctor "but if they were acquainted with your
+family, or if they took any special interest in her, would they not want
+to know what was the nature of her relationship to you? She could not be
+your daughter. They would ask what was her connection with your family.
+To tell them the truth would be of no use at all, for no one on earth
+would believe what we know to be true, nor could I blame them, for I,
+myself, would not have believed it if I had not been a witness."
+
+Miss Ludington was silent a while. Then she said: "It does not matter; we
+see few, I may say no strangers, or even acquaintances; we live alone. It
+is enough that we know her."
+
+"Yes," replied the doctor. "It is, indeed, quite another thing to what it
+would be if you had a large circle of acquaintances. So long as you live,
+it is not important, and I presume that your health is good."
+
+"What is it that is not important?" demanded Miss Ludington.
+
+"Why that she should have a name," replied the doctor, lifting his
+eyebrows with an expression of slight surprise. "Unfortunately, the
+courts do not recognize such a relation as exists between you and this
+young lady. You are the only Miss Ludington in the eye of the law, and
+she is non-existent, or, at least, an anonymous person. She has not so
+much as a-name sign on a hotel-register. But so long as you live to look
+after her she is not likely to suffer."
+
+"But I may die!" exclaimed Miss Ludington.
+
+"In that case it would be rather awkward for her," said the doctor. "She
+would die with you in the eye of the law" and here he branched off into
+rather a fantastical discourse on the oddities and quiddities of the law
+and lawyers, against whom he seemed to have a great grudge.
+
+"But, Dr. Hull, what can I do about it?" said Miss Ludington, as he
+quieted down.
+
+"Excuse me. About what?"
+
+"How can I give her a name in the eye of the law?"
+
+"Oh--ah--exactly? Well, that's easy enough; there are two ways. You can
+adopt her, or some young fellow can marry her, and if I were a young
+man--if you'll excuse an old gentleman for the remark--it would not be my
+fault if she were not provided with a legal title very soon."
+
+Declining Miss Ludington's proposal to send him to the ferry in her
+carriage, the doctor, soon after, took his leave.
+
+He paused as he passed the croquet-ground and stood watching the players.
+It came Ida's turn, and he waited to see her play. It was a very easy
+shot which she had to make; she missed it badly. He bade them
+good-evening, and went on.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+
+It was but a few days after Dr. Hull's visit that Miss Ludington had a
+sudden illness, lasting several days, which, during its crisis, caused
+much alarm.
+
+Ida turned all the servants out of the sick-room and constituted herself
+nurse, watcher, and chambermaid, if she lay down at all it was only after
+leaving a substitute charged to call her upon the slightest occasion.
+Light and quick of step, strong and gentle of hand, patient, tireless,
+and tender, she showed herself an angel of the sick-room.
+
+There was, indeed, something almost eager in the manner in which she
+seized upon this opportunity of devoting herself to Miss Ludington, and
+the zeal with which she made the most of every possibility of rendering
+her a service. She seemed, in fact, almost sorry when the patient had no
+further need of her especial attendance.
+
+To Miss Ludington the revelation that she was so dear to Ida was
+profoundly affecting. It was natural that she should adore Ida, but that
+Ida should be correspondingly devoted to her touched her in proportion to
+its unexpectedness. "I should be glad to be sick always, with you to
+nurse me, my sister," she said. Whenever she addressed Ida by this title
+of sister her voice lingered upon the syllables as if she were striving
+to realize all the mysterious closeness and tenderness of the relation
+between them which its use implied.
+
+The period of convalescence, during which Miss Ludington sat in her room,
+lasted several days, and one evening she sent for Paul. She was alone
+when he came in, and after he had inquired after her condition, she
+motioned him to a chair.
+
+"Sit down, Paul," she said; "I want to have a little talk with you."
+
+He sat down and she went on: "I find that I have been greatly enfeebled
+by this attack, and though the doctor tells me I may regain reasonable
+health, he warns me that I shall not live for ever, and that when I die I
+may die without much warning."
+
+Expressions of mingled grief, surprise, and incredulity from Paul
+interrupted her at this point, but she presently went on:--
+
+"It is really nothing to distress yourself over, my dear child. He does
+not say that I may not live on indefinitely, but only that when death
+comes he is likely to enter without knocking, and I'm sure any sensible
+person would much rather have it so. It was of Ida that I wanted to speak
+to you. Since I have been sick, and especially since what the doctor told
+me, I have been thinking what would become of her if I should die. Did
+you ever consider, Paul, that she has not even a name? The world does not
+recognize the way by which she came back into it, and in the eye of the
+law she has no right to the name of Ida Ludington, or to any other."
+
+"I suppose not," said Paul.
+
+"It does not matter while I live," pursued Miss Ludington; "but what if I
+should die?"
+
+"Let us not talk of that," replied Paul, "or think of it. Yet even in
+that event I should be here to protect her."
+
+Miss Ludington regarded the young man for some moments without speaking,
+and then, as a slight colour tinged her cheek she said, "Paul, do you
+love her?"
+
+"Do you need to ask me that?" he answered.
+
+"No, I do not," she replied; and then as she cast down her eyes, and the
+colour in her cheek grew deeper, she went on: "You know, Paul, that, as
+society is constituted, there is but one way in which a young man can
+protect a young girl who is not his relative, and that is by marrying
+her. Have you thought of that?"
+
+Paul's face flushed a deep crimson, and his forehead reddened to the
+roots of the hair; after which the colour receded, and he became quite
+pale; and then he flushed again deeper than before, till his eyes became
+congested, and he saw Miss Ludington sitting there before him, with
+downcast eyes and a spot of colour in either cheek, as through a fiery
+mist.
+
+Yes, he had thought of it.
+
+The idea that, being of mystery though she was, Ida was still a woman,
+and that he might one day possess her as other men possess their wives,
+had come to him, but it had caused such an ungovernable ferment in his
+blood, and savoured withal of such temerity, that he had been fairly
+afraid to indulge it. In the horizon of his mind it had hovered as a
+dream of unimaginable felicity which might some day in the far future
+come to pass; but that was all.
+
+Finally he said, in a husky voice, "I love her."
+
+"I know you do," replied Miss Ludington. "No one but myself knows how you
+have loved her. You are the only man in the world worthy of her, but you
+are worthy even of her."
+
+"But she would not marry me," said Paul. "She is very good to me, but she
+has never thought of such a thing. It is I that love her, and she is very
+good to let me; but she does not love me. How should she?"
+
+"I think she does," said Miss Ludington, with a tone of quiet assurance.
+"I have never said anything to her about it; but I have observed her. A
+woman can generally read a woman in that particular, and it would be
+especially strange if I could not read her. I do not think that you need
+to be afraid of her answer. I shall not urge her by a word; but if she is
+willing to be your wife, it will be by far the best way her future could
+be provided for. Then, however soon I might die, she would not miss me."
+
+Paul had heard distinctly only her first words, in which she had stated
+her belief that Ida loved him and would probably be his wife. This
+intimation had set up such a turmoil in his brain that he had not been
+able to follow what she had subsequently said. There was a roaring in his
+ears. Her voice seemed to come from very far away, nor did he remember
+how long afterwards it was that he left her.
+
+As he went downstairs the door of the sitting-room stood open, and he
+looked in. Ida sat there reading.
+
+The weather was very warm, and her dress was some gauzy stuff of a
+pale-green tint which set off her yellow hair and bare arms and throat
+with sumptuous effect. She was a ravishing symphony in white, pale green,
+and gold.
+
+She had not heard his approach, and was unconscious of his gaze. As he
+thought of her as the woman who might be his wife, he grew so faint with
+love, so intimidated with a sense of his presumption in hoping to possess
+this glorious creature, that, not daring to enter, he fled out into the
+darkness to compose himself.
+
+No experience of miscellaneous flirtations, or more or less innocent
+dalliance, had ever weakened the witchery of woman's charms to him, or
+dulled the keenness of his sensibility to the heaven she can bestow. For
+an hour he wandered about the dark and silent village street, waiting for
+the tumult of his emotions to subside sufficiently to leave him in some
+degree master of himself. When at last he returned to the house, his
+nerves strung with the resolution to put his fortune to the test, Ida was
+still in the sitting-room where he had left her.
+
+Miss Ludington's conversation with Paul had left her in a mood scarcely
+less  agitated than his. The sensation with which she had watched his
+devotion to Ida during the past weeks had been a sort of double-consciousness
+as if it were herself whom Paul was wooing, although at the same time she
+was a spectator. The thoughts and emotions which she ascribed to Ida
+agitated her almost as if they had been experienced in her proper person.
+
+It was a fancy of hers that between herself and Ida there existed a
+species of clairvoyance, which enabled her to know what was passing in
+the latter's mind--a completeness of rapport never realized between any
+other two minds, but nothing more than might be expected to attend such a
+relationship as theirs, being a foretaste of the tie that joins the
+several souls of an individual in heaven. She had never bad a serious
+love affair in her life, but now, in her old age, she was passing through
+a genuine experience of the tender passion through her sympathetic
+identification with Ida.
+
+As she sat in her chamber after Paul had gone, fancying herself in Ida's
+place, imagining what she would hear him say, what would be her feelings,
+and what she would answer, her cheeks flushed, her breath came quickly,
+and there was a dew like that of dreaming girlhood in her faded eyes.
+
+She was still flushing and trembling when there came a soft knock on her
+door, and Paul and Ida stood before her.
+
+Ida was blushing deeply, with downcast face, and the long lashes hid her
+eyes. She stood slightly bending forward, her long beautifully moulded
+arms hanging straight down before her. She looked like a beautiful
+captive, and Paul, as he clasped her waist with his arm, and held one of
+her hands in his, looked the proudest of conquerors.
+
+"I did not know but I might be dreaming it," he said, "and so I brought
+her for you to see. She says she will be my wife"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+
+
+Paul's courtship of Ida really began the night when he took her in his
+arms as his promised wife, for although she had called him her lover
+before, his devotion, while impassioned enough, had been too distant and
+wholly reverential to be called a wooing. But the night of their
+betrothal his love had caught from her lips a fire that was of earth, and
+it was no longer as a semi-spiritual being that he worshipped her, but as
+a woman whom it was no sacrilege to kiss a thousand times a day, not upon
+her hand, her sleeve, or the hem of her dress, but full upon the soft
+warm mouth.
+
+This transformation of the devotee into the lover on his part was
+attended by a corresponding change in Ida's manner toward him. A model
+relieved from a strained pose could not show more evident relief than she
+did in stepping down from the pedestal of a tutelary saint, where he had
+placed her, to be loved and caressed like an ordinary woman, for if the
+love had at first been all on his side, it certainly was not now.
+
+"I'm so glad," she said one day, "that you have done with worshipping me.
+Think of your humbling yourself before me, you who are a hundred thousand
+times better, and wiser, and greater than I. Oh, Paul it is I who ought
+to worship you, and who am not good enough to kiss you," and before he
+could prevent her she had caught his hand, and, bowing her face over it,
+had kissed it. As he drew it away he felt that there were tears upon it.
+It was evening, and he could not see her face distinctly.
+
+"Darling," he exclaimed, "what is the trouble?"
+
+"Oh, nothing at all!" she replied. "It is because I am in love, I
+suppose."
+
+Whether it was because she was in love or not it is certain that she took
+to crying very often during these days. Her manner with her lover, too,
+was often strangely moody. Sometimes she would display a gaiety that was
+almost feverish, and shortly after, perhaps, he would surprise her in
+tears. But she always declared that she was not unhappy; and, unable to
+conceive of any reason why she should be, Paul was fain to conceive that
+she was merely nervous.
+
+The absorption of the lovers in each other's society naturally left Miss
+Ludington more often alone than before; but Ida was very far from
+neglecting her for her lover. Her care for her since her sickness was
+such as a daughter might give to a beloved and invalid mother. It was an
+attention such as the lonely old lady had never enjoyed in her life, or
+looked for, and would have been most grateful to have had from any one,
+but how much more from Ida!
+
+The village street was a rarely romantic promenade on moonlight evenings,
+and the twanging of Paul's guitar was often heard till after midnight
+from the meeting-house steps, which were a favourite resort with the
+lovers. Those steps, in the Hilton of Miss Ludington's girlhood, had been
+a very popular locality with sentimental couples, and she well remembered
+certain short-lived romances of Ida's first life on earth with which they
+had been associated. One night, when the young people had lingered there
+later than usual, Miss Ludington put on her shawl and stepped across the
+green to warn them that it was time for even lovers to be abed.
+
+As she approached, Paul was seated on the lower step, touching his
+guitar, and facing Ida, who sat on the step above leaning back against a
+pillar. A blotch of moonlight fell upon her dreamy, upturned face. One
+hand lay in her lap, and the fingers of the other were idly playing with
+a tress of hair that had fallen over her bosom. How well Miss Ludington
+remembered that attitude, and even the habit of playing with her hair
+which Ida had in the days so long gone by.
+
+She stood in the shadow watching her till Paul ceased playing. Then she
+advanced and spoke to them.
+
+"I have been standing here looking at you, my sister," she said. "I have
+been trying to imagine how strangely it must come over you that forty
+years ago you sat here as you sit here now, just as young and beautiful
+then as now, and Paul not then born, even his parents children at that
+time."
+
+Ida bent down her head and replied, in scarcely audible tones, "I do not
+like to think of those days."
+
+"And I don't like to think of them," echoed Paul, with a curious
+sensation of jealousy, not the first of the kind that he had experienced
+in imagining the former life of his darling. "I do not like to think who
+may have sat at her feet then. I, too, would like to forget these days."
+
+Ida bent her head still lower and said nothing. It was Miss Ludington who
+spoke.
+
+"You have no ground to feel so," she said. "I can bear her witness--and
+what better witness could you have?--that till now she never knew what it
+is to love, It is true she sat here then as now, and there were others at
+her feet, drawn by the same beauty that has drawn you, but their voices
+never touched her heart. She had to come back again to earth to learn
+what love is."
+
+Paul bent contritely, and kissed Ida's feet as she sat above him,
+murmuring, "Forgive me!" Her hand sought his and pressed it with
+convulsive strength.
+
+They walked home in silence, gentle Miss Ludington inwardly reproaching
+herself for the embarrassment her words had seemed to cause Ida. She
+examined her memory afresh. It was very long ago; she was growing old,
+and it was natural to suppose that her memory might be losing in
+distinctness. Perhaps some, of the sweethearts of that far away time had
+been a little nearer, a little dearer, to Ida than to her own fading
+memory they seemed to have been. Perhaps she had done a stupid thing in
+referring to those days.
+
+Meanwhile, despite of circumstances that would seem peculiarly favourable
+to a young girl's happiness, Ida's tendency to melancholy was increasing
+upon her at a rate which began to cause Miss Ludington as well as Paul
+serious anxiety. She had indeed been pensive from the first, but the
+expression of her face, when in repose, had of late become one of
+profound dejection. The shadow which they had never been able to banish
+from her eyes had deepened into a look of habitual sadness. Coming upon
+her unexpectedly, both Miss Ludington and Paul had several times found
+her in tears, which she would not or could not explain. Not infrequently,
+when she was alone with her lover, and they had been silent awhile, he
+had looked up to find her eyes fixed upon him and brimming with tears,
+and at other times, when he was in the very act of caressing her, she
+would burst out crying, and sob in his arms.
+
+But her unaccountable reluctance to consent to any definite arrangement
+for her marriage with the man she tenderly loved, and had promised to
+wed, was the most marked symptom of something hysterical in her
+condition.
+
+Some three weeks had elapsed since she had given her word to be Paul's
+wife, but though he had repeatedly begged her to name a day for their
+wedding, he had entirely failed to obtain any satisfactory reply. When he
+grew importunate, the only effect was to set her to crying, as if her
+heart would break. He was completely perplexed. If she did not love him
+her conduct would be readily explainable; but that she was in love with
+him, and very much in love with him, he had increasing evidence every
+day.
+
+She gave nothing that could be called a reason for refusing to say when
+she would marry him, though she talked feebly of its being so soon, and
+of not being ready; but when he reminded her of the special
+considerations that made delay inexpedient, of her own peculiarly
+unprotected condition, and of Miss Ludington's uncertain health, and
+desire to see them married as soon as possible, she attempted no reply,
+but took refuge in tears, leaving him no choice but to relinquish the
+question, and devote himself to soothing her.
+
+When, finally, Miss Ludington asked Paul what were their plans, and he
+told her of Ida's strange behaviour, they took troubled counsel together
+concerning her.
+
+It was evident that she was in a state of high nervous tension, and her
+conduct must be attributed to that. Nor was it strange that the
+experiences through which she had passed in the last month or two,
+supplemented by the agitations of so extraordinary a love affair, should
+have left her in a condition of abnormal excitability.
+
+"She must not be hurried," said Miss Ludington. "She has promised to be
+your wife, and you know that she loves you; that ought to be enough to
+give you patience to wait. Why, Paul, you loved her all your life up to
+the last month without even seeing her, and did not think the time long."
+
+"You forget," he replied, "that it is seeing her which makes it so hard
+to wait."
+
+A day or two later, when she chanced to be sitting alone with her in the
+afternoon, Miss Ludington said: "When are you and Paul to be married?"
+
+"It is not decided yet," Ida replied, falteringly.
+
+"Has not Paul spoken to you about it?"
+
+"Oh, yes!"
+
+"I had hoped that you would have been married before this," said Miss
+Ludington, after a pause. "You know why I am so anxious that there should
+be no delay in assuring your position. The time is short I know, but the
+reasons against postponement are strong, and if you love him I. cannot
+see why you should hesitate. Perhaps you are not quite sure that you do
+love him. A girl ought to be sure of that."
+
+"Oh, I am quite sure of that! I love him with all my heart," exclaimed
+Ida, and began to cry.
+
+Miss Ludington sat down beside her, and, drawing the girl's head to her
+shoulder, tried to soothe her; but her gentleness only made Ida sob more
+vehemently.
+
+Presently the elder lady said, "You are nervous, my little sister, don't
+cry, now. We won't talk about it any more. I did not intend to say a word
+to urge you against your wishes, but only to find out what they were. You
+shall wait as long as you please before marrying him, and he shall not
+tease you. Meanwhile I will see to it that, if I should die, you will be
+left secure and well provided for, even if you never marry any one."
+
+"What do you mean?" asked Ida, raising her head and manifesting a sudden
+interest.
+
+"I will adopt you as my daughter," said Miss Ludington, cheerily. "Won't
+it be odd, pretending that you are my daughter, and that instead of
+coming into the world before me you came in after me? But it is the only
+way by which I can give you a legal title to the name of Ida Ludington,
+although it is yours already by a claim prior to mine. I would rather see
+you Paul's wife, and under his protection, but this arrangement will
+secure your safety. You see, until you have a legal name I cannot make
+you my heir, or even leave you a dollar."
+
+"Do you mean that you want to make me your heir?" exclaimed Ida.
+
+"Of course," said Miss Ludington. "What else could I think of doing? Even
+if you had married Paul, do you suppose I would have wished to have you
+dependent on him? I should then have left you a fortune under the name of
+Mrs. De Riemer. As it is, I shall leave it to my adopted daughter, Ida
+Ludington. That is the only difference.
+
+"But, Paul?"
+
+"Don't fret about Paul," replied Miss Ludington. "I shall not neglect
+him. I have a great deal of money, and am able to provide abundantly for
+you both."
+
+"Oh, do not do this thing! I beg you will not," cried Ida, seizing Miss
+Ludington's hands, and looking into her face with an almost frenzied
+expression of appeal. "I do not want your money. Don't give it to me. I
+can't bear to have you. You have given me so much, and you are so good to
+me!--and that I should rob Paul, too! Oh, no I you must not do it; I will
+never let you."
+
+"But, my darling," said Miss Ludington, soothingly, "think what you are
+to me, and what I am to you. Of course you cannot be conscious of our
+relation, in the absolute way I am; through the memory I have of you. I
+can only prove what I am to you by argument and evidence, but surely I
+have fully proved it, and you must not let yourself doubt it; that would
+be most cruel. To whom should I leave my money if not to you? Are we not
+nearer kin than two persons ever were on earth before? What have been the
+claims of all other heirs since property was inherited compared with
+yours? Have I not inherited from you all I am--my very personality--and
+should not you be my heir?
+
+"And remember," she went on, "it is not only as my heir that you have a
+claim on me; your claim would be almost as great if you were neither near
+nor dear to me. It was through my action that you were called back,
+without any will of your own, to resume the life which you had once
+finished on earth. I did not intend or anticipate that result, to be
+sure, but I am not the less responsible for it and being thus
+responsible, though you had been a stranger to me instead of my other
+self, I should be under the most solemn obligation to guard and protect
+the life I had imposed on you."
+
+While Miss Ludington was speaking Ida's tears had ceased to flow, and she
+had become quite calm. She seemed to have been impressed by what Miss
+Ludington had said. At least she offered no further opposition to the
+plan proposed.
+
+"I am very anxious to lose no time," said Miss Ludington, presently, "and
+I think we had better drive into Brooklyn the first thing to-morrow
+morning, and see my lawyer about the necessary legal proceedings."
+
+"Just as you please," said Ida, and presently, pleading a nervous
+headache, she went to her room and remained there the rest of the
+afternoon.
+
+Meanwhile Paul had seen Miss Ludington, and she had told him of her talk
+with Ida, and its result. The young man was beside himself with chagrin,
+humiliation, and baffled love. The fact that Ida had consented to the
+plan of adoption showed beyond doubt that she had given up all idea of
+being his wife, at least for the present, and possibly of ever marrying
+him at all.
+
+Why had she dealt with him so strangely? Why had she used him with such
+cruel caprice? Was ever a man treated so perversely by a woman who loved
+him? Miss Ludington could only shake her head as be poured out his
+complaints to her. Ida's contradictory behaviour was as much a puzzle to
+her as to him, and she deplored it scarcely less. But she insisted that
+he should not trouble the girl by demanding explanations of her, as that,
+by vexing her, would only make matters worse.
+
+If, indeed, Paul had any disposition to take the attitude of an aggrieved
+person, it vanished when he met Ida at the tea-table. The sight of her
+swollen eyes and red lids, and the piteous looks, of deprecating
+tenderness which from time to time she bent on him, left room for nothing
+in his heart but a great love and compassion. Whatever might be the
+secret of this strange caprice it was evidently no mere piece of
+wantonness. She was suffering from it as much as he.
+
+He tried to get a chance to talk with her; but Miss Ludington, feeling
+slightly ill, went to her room directly after tea, and Ida accompanied
+her to see that she was properly cared for, and got comfortably to bed.
+After waiting a long while for her to come downstairs, Paul concluded
+that she did not intend to appear again, and went off for a walk, in the
+hope thereby of regaining something of his equanimity.
+
+It was about ten o'clock when he returned home. As he came in sight of
+the house he saw by the light reflected from the sitting-room windows
+that there was some one upon the piazza. As he came nearer he perceived
+that it was Ida. She was sitting sidewise upon a long, cane-bottomed
+settee, and her arms were thrown upon the back of it to form a sort of
+pillow on which her head rested. His tread upon the turf was inaudible,
+and she neither saw nor heard him as he approached, nor when, softly
+mounting the steps, he stood over her.
+
+She was indeed sobbing with such violence that she could not have been
+easily sensible of anything external. Paul had never heard such piteous
+weeping. He had never seen much of women's crying, and he did not know
+what abandonment of grief their tender frames can sustain--grief that
+seemingly would kill a man if he could feel it. Long, gurgling sobs
+followed one another as the waves of the sea sweep over the head of a
+straggling swimmer. Every now and then they were interrupted by sharp
+cries of exquisite anguish, such as might be wrung out by the sudden
+twist of a rack, and then would come a low, shrill crooning sound, almost
+musical, beyond which it seemed grief could not go.
+
+The violence of the paroxysm would pass, and she would grow calmer,
+drawing long, shuddering breaths as she struggled back to self-control.
+Then a quick panting would begin and grow faster and faster, till another
+burst of sobs shook her like a leaf in the storm.
+
+In very awe of such great grief Paul stood awhile silently over her, the
+tears filling his own eyes and running down his cheeks unheeded. She had
+wept something like this, though nothing like so long or so bitterly, on
+former occasions, when be had urged her with special vehemence to fix a
+day when she would fulfil her promise to be his wife.
+
+Now, as he pondered the piteous spectacle before him, the thought came
+over him that his first reverential instinct concerning her, that despite
+her resumption of a mortal form she was something more than mortal, was
+true, and that he had done wrong in so far forgetting it as to urge her
+to be his wife as if she were merely a woman like others. She herself did
+not know it, but surely this exceeding cruel crying was nothing else but
+the conflict between the love of the woman which went out to her earthly
+lover, and would fain make him happy, and the nature of the inhabitant of
+heaven, where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage. This was
+the key to her inexplicable sorrow during the past weeks. This explained
+why, though she loved him so tenderly, the thought of becoming his wife
+was so intolerable to her.
+
+So be it. Her nature could not sink to his, but his should rise to hers.
+This brief dream of earthly passion must pass. Better a thousand times
+that he should be disappointed in all that is dear to the heart of a man,
+than that he should grieve her thus. In that moment it did not seem hard
+to him to sacrifice the hopes of the man to the devotion of the lover. By
+one great effort he rose again to the level of the ascetic passion that
+had glorified his life up to these last delirious weeks. She had brought
+heaven to earth for him, but it should still be heaven, since her
+happiness demanded it.
+
+And having reasoned thus, at last, for there seemed no end of her
+weeping, or any diminution of its bitterness, he touched her. She
+started, and turned her streaming eyes to him, then, seeing who it was,
+threw her arms around his neck, and, as he sat beside her, laid her head
+on his shoulder clinging to him convulsively.
+
+"You don't believe I love you, Paul; and I can't blame you for it, I
+can't blame you," she sobbed; "but I do, oh, I do!"
+
+"I do believe it. I know it," he said. "Don't think that I doubt it, and
+don't cry now, for after this your love shall be enough for me. I will
+not trouble you any more with importunings to be my wife. I have been
+very cruel to you."
+
+"It is because I love you that I will not marry you," she sobbed.
+"Promise me you will never doubt that. Don't ask me to explain to you why
+it is; only believe me."
+
+"I think I understand why it is already," he replied, gently. "I was very
+dull not to know before. If I had known, I should not have caused you so
+much grief."
+
+She raised her head from his shoulder.
+
+"What is it that you know?" she asked, quickly.
+
+He thereupon proceeded to tell her, in tenderest words of reverence,
+what, in his opinion, was the mystical cause, unsuspected, perhaps, even
+by herself, of her unconquerable repugnance to the idea of being his
+wife, truly as he knew she loved him. He blamed himself that he had not
+recognized the sacred instinct which had held her back, but in his
+selfish blindness had gone on urging her to do violence to her nature.
+Now that his eyes were opened he would not grieve her any more. Her love
+alone should satisfy and bless him. Earthly passion should no more vex
+her serenity.
+
+When he first began to speak she had regarded him with evident
+astonishment. As the meaning of his words became clear to her she had
+turned her face away from him and covered it with both her hands, as a
+person does under an overpowering sense of shame. She did not remove them
+until he had finished, when she rose abruptly.
+
+Light enough came from the windows behind them for him to see that her
+cheeks and forehead were crimson.
+
+"I think I may as well go now," she said. "Good-bye." And in another
+moment he found himself alone, not a little astonished at the suddenness
+of her departure.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+
+
+Ida passed with a quick step through the sitting-room and upstairs to her
+bedroom, where she locked the door and threw herself upon the bed in a
+paroxysm of tearless sobbing.
+
+"I believe I have no more tears left," she whispered, as at last she
+raised herself and arranged her dishevelled hair.
+
+She sat awhile in woful reverie upon the edge of the bed, and then
+crossed the room to a beautiful writing-desk which Miss Ludington had
+given her. She opened it, and, taking out several sheets of paper,
+prepared to write. "If I had not run upstairs that moment," she murmured,
+"I must have told him the whole horrible story. But it is better this
+way. I believe it would have killed me to see the look on his face. Oh,
+my darling, my darling! what will you think of me when you know?" and
+then she sat down to write.
+
+She stopped so many times to cry over it that it was midnight when the
+writing was finished. It was a letter, and the superscription read as
+follows:--
+
+"To my lover, Paul, who will never love me any mere after he reads this,
+but whom I shall love for ever:--
+
+"This letter will explain to you why my room is empty this morning. I
+could stand it no longer: to be loved and almost worshipped, by those
+whom I was basely deceiving. And so I have fled. You will never see me or
+hear from me again, and you will never want to after you have read this
+letter. All the jewellery and dresses, and everything that Miss Ludington
+has given me, I have left behind, except the clothes I had to have to go
+away in, and these I will return as soon as I get where I am going. Oh,
+my poor Paul! I am no more Ida Ludington than you are. How could you ever
+believe such a thing? But let me tell my shameful story in order. Perhaps
+it was not so strange that you were deceived. I think any one might have
+been who held the belief you did at the outset.
+
+"I am Ida Slater, Mrs. Slater's daughter, whom she named after Miss
+Ludington, because she thought her name so pretty when they went to
+school together as children in Hilton. I was born in Hilton twenty-three
+years ago, several years after Miss Ludington left the village. My father
+is Mr. Slater, of course, but he is the person you know as Dr. Hull,
+which is an assumed name. Mrs. Legrand, who is no more dead than you are,
+is a sister of my father. Her husband is dead, and father acts as her
+manager, and mother helps about the seances, and does what she can in any
+way to bring a little money. We have always been very poor, and it has
+been very, very hard for us to get a living. Father is a man of
+education, and had tried many things before we came to this, but nothing
+succeeded. We grew poorer and poorer, and when this business came in our
+way he had to take up with it or send us to the almshouse. It is not an
+honest business, at least as we conducted it; but, oh, Paul! none of you
+that are rich understand that to a very poor man the duty of supporting
+his family seems sometimes as if it were the only duty in the world.
+
+"Well, when mother came to visit Miss Ludington, and saw that picture
+which is so much like me, and so little, mother says, like what Miss
+Ludington ever was, and when she found out about your belief in the
+immortality of past selves, the idea first came to her of deceiving you.
+
+"That story of mother's going to Cincinnati was a lie, to prevent your
+suspecting that she had anything to do with the business. Mrs. Rhinehart
+is an imaginary person. At first, the idea was only to get you interested
+in the seances, for the profit of the fees; but when they saw how
+entirely deceived you were by my resemblance to the picture, the scheme
+of getting me into this house occurred to them.
+
+"Or rather it did not occur to them at all. It was you, Paul, yourself,
+who suggested it, when you said that night after the first seance, that
+if a medium died in a trance, you believed the materialized spirit could
+not dematerialize but would return to earth. But for that the idea would
+never have occurred to them.
+
+"It seemed a daring plot, but many things favoured it. I had lived in
+Hilton up to within a few years, and knew every stick and stone of the
+old as well as the new part of the village. I had wandered all over the
+old Ludington homestead time and again. Mother knew as much about Miss
+Ludington's early life as she did herself, and could post me on the
+subject, and there was my wonderful resemblance to the picture, which, of
+itself, would be almost enough to carry me through.
+
+"It was for my sake entirely that they proposed this scheme. My father
+and mother may be looked down upon by the world as a very poor kind of
+people, but they have always been very good to me. I will not have you
+blame them except as you blame me with them. They thought that in this
+way I could be rescued from the hard and questionable life which they
+were living, and in which they did not wish me to grow up. If the plan
+succeeded, and you were deceived and took me here, thinking me the true
+Ida, they believed that I would be secured a life of happiness and
+luxury. They had seen, too, how you were in love with the true Ida, and
+made no question that you would love me and marry me.
+
+"It was that more than all, Paul, that decided me to do it. I had fallen
+in love with you that night of the first seance when I stood before you
+and you looked at me with such boundless, adoring love. I think it would
+have turned almost any girl's head to be looked at in that way. And then,
+Paul, you are very handsome.
+
+"I always had a taste for acting. They used to say I would have done well
+on the stage, and the idea of playing a role so fine and so bold as this
+took my fancy from the start. It was that, Paul, that, and the notion of
+your making love to me, more than any thought of the wealth and luxury I
+might get a share in, which made me consent to the plan.
+
+"That sickness of Mrs. Legrand's between the seances--I am telling you
+all, Paul--was only a sham, so that we might see how much in earnest you
+were, and to get time for me to learn by heart all mother could teach me
+about the Hilton of forty years ago and Miss Ludington's girlhood. There
+were so many lists of names to be kept in mind, and school-room
+incidents, picnics, and flirtations; but it was as interesting as a
+romance, and being a Hilton girl, it did not take me long to make myself
+as much at home with the last generation as with my own. Sometimes mother
+would say to me, 'Ida, if I did not know that you are a good girl, and
+would be good to Miss Ludington, I would not betray my old friend this
+way. I would not do it for any one but you, and if I did not believe that
+in deceiving her you would make her very happy--far happier than now.'
+
+"I think, in spite of all, she was very fond of Miss Ludington, for she
+made me promise, again and again, that I would be very good to her, as if
+I could have helped being good to such a gentle, tender-hearted person as
+she.
+
+"You see, in our business, we had shown to so many sad people what they
+believed to be the forms and faces of their dead friends, and had sent
+them away comforted, that we had come to feel our frauds condoned by the
+happiness they caused, and that we were, after all, doing good.
+
+"As for you, Paul, mother had no scruples. She said that I was a good
+girl, and any man was lucky to get me. I was not sure of that, but I knew
+that any girl would be fortunate whom you loved. She had a dress cut for
+me in the exact pattern of that in the picture--a very old-fashioned
+pattern, but very becoming to me--and all was ready. You know the rest.
+
+"I forgot to say that the reason the dress all fell to pieces the day
+after I came here was that it had been treated with a chemical
+preparation, which had completely rotted the texture of the cloth. Indeed
+I had trouble to keep it together that first night. Father saw to this
+part. He understands chemistry, and indeed, everything else except how to
+make a living.
+
+"There was no trap-door in the floor in Tenth Street, but the whole
+ceiling of the cabinet was a trap-door, the edges hidden by the breadth
+of the boards forming the partition which enclosed it. It rose on oiled
+hinges, with a pulley and a counter-weight, at a touch of a finger, and
+the person who was to appear, unless it was a part that the medium
+herself could take, descended in an instant by letting down a short light
+ladder, wrapped in cloth, so as to make no sound. The draught of air just
+before the appearance, which Miss Ludington had spoken of in her talks
+with me, was something that we never thought of, and was caused, I
+suppose, by the drawing of the air up through the raised ceiling.
+
+"It was all so easy, so easy; we need not have taken half the precautions
+we did; you were so absolutely convinced from the first moment that I was
+the Ida of the picture. From the time I came home with you that night
+till now there has been no question of my proving who I was, but only of
+Miss Ludington's proving, and of your proving, to me, that you were the
+persons you claimed to be. It was not whether I was related to her, but
+only that she was related to me, which Miss Ludington thought in any need
+of demonstration.
+
+"And as for you, Paul, it is not your fault that I was not your wife
+weeks ago.
+
+"And so I should have been, and Miss Ludington's heir besides, but for
+two particulars in which our plot was fatally defective. It provided for
+all contingencies, but made no allowance for the possibilities that I
+might prove capable of gratitude towards Miss Ludington, and that I might
+fall in love with you. Both these things have happened to me, and there
+is no choice left me but to fly in the night. Of course I had expected
+you to fall in love with me, and had fancied you so much, after seeing
+you the first time, as to feel that it would be very fine to have you for
+a lover, and even for a husband. But that was not really love at all. I
+think if you could understand even a little what dismay came over me when
+I first realized that my heart was yours, you would almost pity me. After
+that, to deceive you was torture to me, and yet, to tell you the truth
+would have been to make you loathe me like a snake. Oh, Paul! think of
+what I have suffered these past weeks, and pity me a little!
+
+"You will understand now why it was that I could not bear to have the
+circumstances of the fraud we had practised on you alluded to in my
+presence, and why, after the first few days, I never spoke of them
+myself.
+
+"When father, whom you know as Dr. Hull, came that day to see how the
+plot was succeeding, I thought I should die with shame. He tried to catch
+my eye, and to get a chance to speak with me, but I avoided him. He must
+have gone away very much puzzled by my conduct, for it had been arranged
+between us that he should come. By that time, you see, I had become
+heart-sick of the part I was playing.
+
+"But, Paul, you must not think that it was mere sham, father's drawing
+you out so much to talk at the table that night, and pretending to be so
+much taken up with what you said. He is great for being taken up with new
+ideas, and I think his interest was quite genuine. I knew before I left
+home that he half believed you to be right about the immortality of past
+selves. For my part, I believe it wholly, and that I have abused not only
+Miss Ludington and you, but the spirit of her whom I have personated.
+
+"If Miss Ludington bad not so loaded me with kindness I could have borne
+it, better, but to have that sweet old lady fairly worshipping the ground
+one trod on, and covering one with gifts, and dresses, and jewels, would
+have been too much, I think, for the conscience of the worst person in
+the world.
+
+"I should have fled from the house before I had been here a week but for
+you, Paul. I could not bear to leave you. If I had only gone then I
+should have saved myself much; for what would it have been to leave you
+then to what it is now!
+
+"It was very wrong in me to promise to marry you that night when you came
+to me; for I knew then as well as now that I never could. But I loved you
+so, I had no strength. Oh, these last happy weeks! I wonder if you have
+been so happy as I--so happy or so miserable, I don't know which to say;
+for all the time there was a deadly sickness at my heart, and every night
+I cried myself to sleep, and woke up crying; and yet I loved you so I
+could not but be happy in being where you were. Remember always, Paul,
+that if I had not loved you so, I should have let you marry an
+adventuress; for that is what I suppose you will call me now--you, who
+could not find words tender enough for me. Yes, if I had loved you less,
+I would have been your wife, and I would have made you very happy, just
+as we made so many poor people happy at our seances--by deceiving them.
+But I could not deceive you.
+
+"It is true that I have been meanwhile deceiving you, but it has only
+been from day to day. I knew it was not to last, and I lacked strength to
+end it sooner. Think how dear your kisses must have been to me, that I
+could endure them with the knowledge all the while that if you knew whom
+you were kissing, you would spurn me with your foot.
+
+"As soon as you began to urge me to name a day for our marriage I knew
+that the end was near. You wondered why I cried so whenever you spoke of
+it. You know now. To-day Miss Ludington told me that she intended to
+adopt me and leave me her fortune, so that I need feel under no necessity
+to marry you if I did not wish to. Think of that, Paul! Can you conceive
+of any one so low, so base, as to be capable of taking advantage of such
+a heart? As she was talking to me, I made up my mind that I must go
+to-night.
+
+"This evening, when I was helping her to bed (I have been so glad to do
+all I could for her; it took away a little of my shame to see how happy I
+made her) she seemed so troubled because I could not keep my tears from
+falling. When you read her this she will think her sympathy wasted. And
+yet she will not think hard of me. She could not think hard of any one,
+and I am sure I love her dearly, and always shall.
+
+"Oh, Paul, my darling, do not despise me utterly! My love was pure; it
+was as pure as any one's could be, though I have been so bad. I think my
+heart was breaking when you found me crying on the piazza to-night. It
+was not only that I must leave you, and never look on your face again,
+but that I must give over my memory to your scorn and loathing. When you
+took me in your arms and comforted me, my resolution all gave way, and I
+felt that I would not, could not, go. I think I was on the point of
+throwing myself at your feet and confessing all, and begging to be taken
+as the lowest servant in the house, so that I might be near you.
+
+"And then it was that you began to explain to me that, although I might
+not be aware of it, the reason that I would not be your wife was that,
+having come from heaven, my nature was purer than that of earthly women,
+and shrank from marriage as a sacrilege.
+
+"Think of your saying that to me!
+
+"When I comprehended you, and saw that you actually believed what you
+said, I realized the folly of imagining that you could ever pardon me for
+what I had done, or that the gulf between what I was and what you thought
+me to be could ever be bridged. So it was that you yourself gave me back
+the resolution and the strength to leave you, which went from me when I
+was in your arms. I was overcome with such shame and self-contempt that I
+could not even kiss you as I left you for ever.
+
+"I have told you my whole story, Paul, that you may know not alone how
+black my deception was, but how bitterly I have expiated it. I came into
+this house a frivolous girl; I leave it a broken-hearted woman. Do not
+blame me too harshly. It is myself that I have injured most. I leave you
+as well off as before you saw me; free to return to your spirit-love. She
+will forgive you. It is my only consolation that she is but a
+spirit-love. If she were a woman I could never have given you up to her.
+Never! Oh, Paul! If I could only hope that you would not wholly despise
+me, that you, would think sometimes a little pitifully of
+                                                         "IDA SLATER."
+
+She next wrote a note to Miss Ludington, full of contrition and
+tenderness, and referring her to Paul's letter for the whole story. It
+was after two o'clock in the morning when she finished the second letter,
+and laid it in plain view beside the other. She next removed her jewels
+and exchanged her rich costume for the simplest in her wardrobe, and
+having donned cloak and hat, extinguished the light, and softly unlocking
+the door, stepped into the hall.
+
+Perfect silence reigned in the house. As she stood listening the clock in
+the sitting-room struck three. There was no time to lose. The early
+summer dawn would soon arrive, and, before the first servants of
+neighbours were stirring she must be outside the grounds and well on her
+way.
+
+There was a late risen moon, and enough light penetrated the house to
+enable her to make her way without difficulty. As she passed Paul's door
+she stopped and stood leaning her forehead against the casement for some
+minutes. At last she knelt and pressed her lips to the threshold, and,
+choking down a sob, went on downstairs. As she passed through the
+sitting-room she paused a moment before the picture. "Forgive me," she
+whispered, looking up at the dimly visible face of Ida Ludington, and
+passed on. Unfastening a window that opened upon the piazza, she stepped
+forth and closed it behind her.
+
+At the first light sound of her feet upon the walk, the mastiff that
+guarded the house bounded up to her, and seeing who it was, licked her
+hand. The big beast had fallen in love with her on her first arrival, and
+been her devoted attendant ever since. She sat down on the edge of the
+walk and put her arms around his neck, wetting his shaggy coat with her
+tears. Here was a friend who would know no difference between Ida Slater
+and Ida Ludington. Here was one who loved her for herself.
+
+Presently she rose, dried her eyes, and went on down the street, the dog
+trotting contentedly behind her. As she came to a point beyond which the
+trees cut off the view of the house, she stood still, gazing back at it
+for a long time. Finally, with a gesture of renunciation, she turned and
+passed swiftly out of sight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+
+
+It was Miss Ludington herself who, stirring unusually early, discovered
+Ida's flight on going to her room.
+
+Paul opened his eyes a few minutes later to see her standing by his
+bedside, the picture of consternation.
+
+"She is gone!" she exclaimed.
+
+"Who is gone?" he asked, rubbing his eyes.
+
+"Ida has gone. Her room is empty."
+
+Hastily dressing, he rejoined her in Ida's chamber, and together they
+went over the letters she had left.
+
+If the revelation which they contained had been made when she had been in
+the house a shorter time, its effect might have been very different. But
+it had come too late to produce the revulsion of feeling it might then
+have caused. True, it was under a false name that she had first won their
+confidence, but it was the girl herself they had learned to love. If her
+name proved to be Ida Slater, why it was Ida Slater whom they loved. It
+was the person, not the name.
+
+"Oh, why did she leave us!" cried Miss Ludington, with streaming eyes, as
+she finished Ida's letter to Paul. "Why did she not come to us and tell
+us! We would have forgiven her. She was not so much to blame as her
+parents. How can we blame her when we think how happy she has made us!
+Oh, Paul! we must find her. We must bring her back."
+
+He pressed her hand in silence. His darling, his heart's love, had gone
+away from him, out into the world, and he knew not where to find her, and
+yet it would be hard to say whether there was not more of exultation than
+of despair in the mingled emotions which just then deprived him of the
+power of speech.
+
+He had comprehended perfectly well her confession of the deception which
+she had practised on them, but the portion of her letter which had
+chiefly affected him had been the impassioned avowal of her love for him.
+After his recent trying ordeal in striving to subject an earthly love to
+spiritual conditions, culminating the night before in the renunciation of
+the hope of ever marrying her at all, there was an intoxicating happiness
+in the discovery that she was every whit as earthly as he, and loved him
+with a passion as ardent as his own. He was a Pygmalion, whose statue had
+become a woman. For the first time he now realized how far his heart had
+travelled from the spirit-love which once had been enough for it, and how
+impossible it was that it should ever again find satisfaction in the dim
+and nebulous emotion in which it had so long rested. With a sense of
+recreancy that was wholly shameless, he realized that it was no longer
+Ida Ludington, but Ida Slater, whom he loved.
+
+Little did the forlorn girl, in her self-imposed exile, imagine what a
+welcome would have met her if, moved by some intuition, she had retraced
+her steps that morning to the chamber which a few hours before she had
+deserted.
+
+Repentance often is so fine that in the moral balance it quite outweighs
+the fault repented of, and so it was in her case. Such repentance is as
+if the black stalk of sin had blossomed and put forth a fragrant flower.
+
+These two persons, whom she had expected to loathe her as soon as they
+should know the truth, had from the first reading of her story been more
+impressed with the chivalrous instinct which had driven her to abandon
+her role of fraud when it was about to be crowned with dazzling success,
+than with her original offence in entering upon it. The effect of her
+story was in this respect a curious one for a confession to produce: it
+had added to the affection which they had previously entertained for her,
+an appreciation of the nobility of her character which they had not then
+possessed.
+
+Paul's heart yearned after its mistress in her self-humiliation and
+voluntary banishment as never before. This impassioned and most human
+woman, who had shown herself capable of wrong, and, also, of most
+generous renunciation, had struck a deeper chord in his breast than had
+ever vibrated to the touch of the flawless seraph he had supposed her to
+be.
+
+Having canvassed all possible methods of reaching Ida in her flight, it
+was decided by Paul and his aunt to begin by advertising, and that same
+day the following notice was inserted in all the daily papers of Brooklyn
+and New York;--
+
+"IDA S----R.--All is forgiven; only come back. We cannot live without
+you. For pity's sake at least write to us.
+                                             "Miss L----AND PAUL."
+
+
+This advertisement was to remain in the papers till forbidden. If Ida was
+anywhere in the two cities or vicinity, the chances were that it would
+fall under the notice of herself or some of her family. Before inserting
+the advertisement Paul had visited Mrs. Legrand's house in East Tenth
+Street; but, as he had expected, he found that the family had moved away
+long previously, probably with a view to avoid detection, and to enable
+Mrs. Legrand to obtain business elsewhere.
+
+A week passed without any response to the advertisement. Paul spent his
+days walking the streets of New York and Brooklyn at random, for the sake
+of the chance, about one in ten billions, that he might meet Ida.
+Anything was more endurable than sitting at home waiting, and by dint of
+tramping all day long he was so dead tired when he reached home at night
+that he could sleep, which otherwise would have been out of the question.
+
+About the middle of the week a bundle arrived, containing the dress Ida
+had worn away, with her hat and cloak, but without a word of writing;
+Paul devoured them with kisses. A study of the express markings showed
+that the package must have been sent from Brooklyn, which went to show
+that Ida was in that city. Believing that she did not intend to respond
+to the advertisement, Paul had determined, if he did not hear from her
+within a few days, to employ a prominent New York detective firm to
+search for her. If he could but once see her face to face, he was sure
+that he could bring her back.
+
+A week from the day on which she had fled he was starting out as usual,
+early in the morning, for another day of hopeless, weary tramping in the
+city, when the postman handed him a letter addressed in her handwriting.
+It was to him like a voice from the grave, and read as follows:--
+
+"I have seen your advertisement for me. I cannot believe that you have
+forgiven me. You could not do it. It is impossible. Even if I could
+believe it, I do not think I should ever have the courage to face you
+after what you know of me. I should die of shame. Oh, Paul! if you could
+see how my cheeks burn as I write this, and know that you will see it.
+But I cannot deny myself the happiness of writing to you. There is no
+reason why we should not write sometimes, is there? though we never see
+each other. Does Miss Ludington really forgive me, or does she merely
+consent to have me return because you still care for me? If you do still
+care for me--Oh, Paul! I cannot believe it--do you forget what I have
+done? Read over again the letter I left for you when I came away. You
+must have forgotten it. Read it carefully. Think it all over. Oh, no,
+you cannot love me still!
+                                                "IDA SLATER."
+
+
+Paul replied with the first love-letter he had ever written, and one that
+any woman who loved him must have found irresistible. He enclosed a note
+from Miss Ludington, assuring Ida of the unhappiness which her flight had
+caused them, the undiminished tenderness which they cherished for her;
+and the cruelty she would be guilty of if she refused to return.
+
+In response to these letters there came a note saying simply, "I will
+come."
+
+On the evening of the day this note was received, as Paul and Miss
+Ludington were together in the sitting-room talking as usual of Ida, and
+wondering on what day she would return, there was a light step at, the
+open door, and she glided into the room, and, throwing herself on her
+knees before Miss Ludington, hid her face in her lap.
+
+It was an hour before she would raise her head, replying the while only
+with sobs to the kisses and caresses showered upon her, and the
+assurances of love and welcome poured into her ears.
+
+When at last she lifted her face her embarrassment was so distressing
+that in pity Miss Ludington told Paul he might take her out for a walk in
+the dark.
+
+When they came back her cheeks were flushed as redly as when she went
+out; but, despite her shame, she looked very happy.
+
+"She is to be my wife in two weeks from to-day," said Paul, exultantly.
+
+"I ought not to let him marry me. I know I ought not. I am not fit for
+him," faltered Ida; "but I cannot refuse him anything, and I love him
+so!"
+
+"You are quite fit for him," said Miss Ludington, kissing her, "and I can
+well believe he loves you. It would be strange, indeed, if he did not.
+You are a noble and a tender woman, and he will be very happy."
+
+In the days that followed, Ida was at first much puzzled to account not
+only for the evident genuineness of the esteem which her friends
+cherished for her, but for the fact that it seemed to have been enhanced
+rather than diminished by the recent events. Instead of regarding her
+repentance as at most offsetting her offence, they apparently looked upon
+it as a positive virtue redounding wholly to her credit. It was quite as
+if she had made amends for another person a sin, in contrast with whose
+conduct her own nobility stood out in fine relief.
+
+And that, in fact, is exactly the way they did look at it. Their habit of
+distinguishing between the successive phases of an individual life as
+distinct persons, made it impossible for them to take any other view of
+the matter.
+
+In their eyes the past was good or bad for itself, and the present good
+or bad for itself, and an evil past could no more shadow a virtuous
+present than a virtuous present could retroact to brighten or redeem an
+ugly past. It is the soul that repents which is ennobled by repentance.
+The soul that did the deed repented of is past forgiving. There was no
+affectation on the part of Paul or Miss Ludington of ignoring the fraud
+which Ida had practised, or pretending to forget it. This was not
+necessary out of any consideration for her feelings, for they did not
+hold that it was she who was guilty of that fraud, but another person.
+
+As gradually she comprehended the way in which they looked upon her, and
+came to perceive that they unquestioningly held that she had no
+responsibility for her past self, but was a new being, she was filled
+with a great exhilaration, the precise like of which was, perhaps, never
+before known to a repentant wrong-doer. As they believed, so would she
+believe. With a great joy she put the shameful past behind her and took
+up her new life. "As a man thinketh in his heart so is he."
+
+If she had loved Paul before, if she had before felt tenderly toward Miss
+Ludington, a passion of gratitude now intensified her love, her
+tenderness, a thousand-fold.
+
+Miss Ludington's failing health was the only shadow on the perfect
+happiness of the lovers during those two weeks of courtship. Compared
+with the intoxicating reality of these golden days Paul looked back on
+his wooing of the supposed Ida Ludington as a vague and unsatisfying
+dream.
+
+Now that Ida was no longer playing a part, he was really just becoming
+acquainted with her, and finding out what manner of maiden it was to whom
+he had lost his heart. Each day, almost each hour, discovered to him some
+new trait, some unsuspected grace of mind or heart, till, in this glowing
+girl, so bright, so blithe, so piquant, he had difficulty in recognizing
+any likeness, save of face and form, to the moody, freakish, melancholy,
+hysterical, and altogether eerie Ida Ludington.
+
+"I am so glad," Miss Ludington said to her one day, "that you are Ida
+Slater, and not my Ida."
+
+"Why are you glad?" Ida asked. "Would you not have been happier if you
+had gone on believing me to be your girlish self?"
+
+"I should have grown very sad by this time if I had continued to think
+that you were she?" replied Miss Ludington. "I have not long to live,
+and it is far more important to me that she should be there to welcome me
+when I go over than that I should have her here with me for a few days
+before I go. If she were here on earth the thought of so soon leaving her
+behind would sadden me as much as the hope of meeting her now gladdens me."
+
+Miss Ludington neither talked herself nor permitted others to talk in a
+melancholy tone of the probable nearness of her end. "Death may seem
+dreadful," she said to Ida one day, "to the foolish people who fancy that
+an individual dies but once, forgetting that their present selves are but
+the last of many selves already dead. The death which may now be near me
+is no sadder, no more important, than the deaths of my past selves, and
+no different, save in the single respect that this time no later self
+will follow me. This house of our individuality, which has sheltered us
+in turn, having become incapable of being repaired for the use of
+subsequent tenants, is to be pulled down. That is all."
+
+Another time she said, "It is very strange to see people who dread death
+always looking for it instead of backward. In their fear of dying once
+they quite forget that they have died already many times. It is the most
+foolish of all things to imagine that by prolonging the career of the
+individual, death is kept at bay. The present self must die in any case
+by the inevitable process of time, whether the body be kept in repair for
+later selves or not. The death of the body is but the end of the daily
+dying that makes up earthly life."
+
+They were married in the sitting-room before the picture that had exerted
+so strong an influence upon their lives. The servants were invited in,
+but there was no company. Ida wore a white satin with a low corsage, and
+as she stood directly below the picture, the resemblance impressed the
+beholders very strikingly. It was as if the girl had stepped down from
+the picture to be married.
+
+Ida had demurred a little to standing just there, which bad been the
+suggestion of Miss Ludington. She was not without a vague superstition
+that the spirit of the girl whose lover she had stolen away would not
+wish her well. But when she hinted this, Miss Ludington replied, "You
+must not think of it that way. What has a spirit like her to do with
+earthly passions? Your love has saved Paul from a dream as vain as it was
+beautiful, and which, had it gone on, might have gained a morbid strength
+and blighted his life. I like to fancy, and I know it is Paul's belief,
+that the spirit of my Ida influenced you to come to us just as you came,
+that under her form Paul might fall in love with you. In no other way but
+just this do I believe he could have been cured of his infatuation."
+
+Owing to the precarious condition of Miss Ludington's health, Paul and
+Ida would not consent to leave home for any bridal trip.
+
+It was but a week after the wedding that, on going into Miss Ludington's
+room as usual the first thing in the morning, Ida found her dead. She
+must have expired very quietly, if not, indeed, in her sleep, for her
+room adjoined that of the bridal couple, and she could have summoned Ida
+with the touch of a bell. Her features were relaxed in a smile of joyous
+recognition.
+
+        *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Paul took his wife to Europe directly after the funeral. One night,
+during their absence, a fire, probably set by tramps, broke out in one of
+the empty houses of the village, and, the wind being high and no help
+near, all the buildings on the place, including the homestead, were
+completely destroyed. The latter being shut up, nothing even of the
+furniture could be saved, and the entire contents, including the picture
+in the sitting-room, were consumed. The tourists were much shocked by the
+receipt of the intelligence, but Paul expressed the inmost conviction of
+both when he finally said, "Now that she is gone, perhaps it is as well.
+Ashes to ashes! The past has claimed its own."
+
+They never rebuilt the village or the homestead, but on their return to
+this country took up their residence in New York. The site of the mimic
+Hilton is once more tilled as a farm.
+
+It is scarcely necessary to add that Ida made such provision for her
+family as enabled them to retire from the medium business. Paul insisted
+that this provision should be at the most generous nature, for was he not
+indebted to them for the happiness of his life? He never would admit that
+Mrs. Legrand was a fraud, but always maintained that none but a truly
+great medium could have materialized the vaguest of love-dreams into the
+sweetest of wives.
+
+As for Dr. Hull, or, rather, Mr. Slater, he became in time quite a crony
+of Paul's, and the book on which the latter is engaged, setting forth the
+argument for the immortality of past selves, will owe not a little to the
+suggestions of the old gentleman.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Miss Ludington's Sister, by Edward Bellamy
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MISS LUDINGTON'S SISTER ***
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