Miss Dodan came to the plateau and was helpful; to me especially.  She kept up my breaking spirits, and her womanly tenderness, her brave grace, and the joy my loving heart felt in seeing her, enabled me to go through the trial of death and separation.

All was finished.  My father was buried in Christ Church cemetery by his own request, although thus separated by a hemisphere from his wife.

* * * * *

A year had passed.  I had received nothing.  Mr. and Miss Dodan came to the observatory.  They both were acquainted with the singular prepossessions which controlled both myself and my father, and I think Mr. Dodan was himself, though he admitted nothing, most curious and interested in the whole matter.  Miss Dodan frankly said she was.  But I know, to Miss Dodan’s fresh, healthy, human life there was something weirdly repellent in this thought of communication with the dead.  She thought of it with a nervous dread and excitement.  It just kept me in her thoughts a little shrouded in mystery and superiority and closed a little the avenues of absolute confidence and peaceful self-surrender.

I had forgotten nothing, although at first an overwhelming sense of the uselessness of the attempt, the almost grotesque absurdity of expecting to hear from beyond the limits of the earth’s atmosphere any word transmitted through a mechanical invention, upon the earth’s crust, made me feel somewhat ashamed of my preparations, yet I arranged every portion of the receiver and exercised my best skill to give it the most delicate adjustment.

Whenever I had occasion to rest I either sent an assistant to the post, or kept on my pillow, adjusted to my ear, a telephone attachment to the Morse register, so that its signals might instantly receive attention.  At length as time wore on I arranged a bell signal that might summon us to the register.

On the occasion of this visit by the Dodans I was in the loft at the receiver which was in a room to one side of that we called “the equatorial,” where the telescope was suspended.  I was as usual waiting for a message that never came, and my failing hopes, made more and more transitory by the brightness of the southern spring and all the instant present industry of the fields below me on the low-lands, seemed to dissolve into a mocking phantom of derisive dreams.

I stood up hackneyed and forlorn.  Had I not done everything I could?  Had I not kept my promise?  I heard the voices below me; one, that musical tone, that made the color come and go upon my cheeks, and as I turned hastily to descend to them while the breathing earth seemed to send upward its powerful sensitizing odors that turn energy into languorous desire, and touch the senses with indolence; at that moment the Morse register spoke!