“Then you do not believe in her?” said Wilfrid.

“Oh yes, I do,” said the pastor, genially, “I think her a very capricious girl; a little spoilt by her parents, who turned her head with the religious ideas I have just revealed to you.”

Minna shook her head in a way that gently expressed contradiction.

“Poor girl!” continued the old man, “her parents bequeathed to her that fatal exaltation of soul which misleads mystics and renders them all more or less mad.  She subjects herself to fasts which horrify poor David.  The good old man is like a sensitive plant which quivers at the slightest breeze, and glows under the first sun-ray.  His mistress, whose incomprehensible language has become his, is the breeze and the sun-ray to him; in his eyes her feet are diamonds and her brow is strewn with stars; she walks environed with a white and luminous atmosphere; her voice is accompanied by music; she has the gift of rendering herself invisible.  If you ask to see her, he will tell you she has gone to the astral regions.  It is difficult to believe such a story, is it not?  You know all miracles bear more or less resemblance to the story of the Golden Tooth.  We have our golden tooth in Jarvis, that is all.  Duncker the fisherman asserts that he has seen her plunge into the fiord and come up in the shape of an eider-duck, at other times walking on the billows of a storm.  Fergus, who leads the flocks to the saeters, says that in rainy weather a circle of clear sky can be seen over the Swedish castle; and that the heavens are always blue above Seraphita’s head when she is on the mountain.  Many women hear the tones of a mighty organ when Seraphita enters the church, and ask their neighbors earnestly if they too do not hear them.  But my daughter, for whom during the last two years Seraphita has shown much affection, has never heard this music, and has never perceived the heavenly perfumes which, they say, make the air fragrant about her when she moves.  Minna, to be sure, has often on returning from their walks together expressed to me the delight of a young girl in the beauties of our spring-time, in the spicy odors of budding larches and pines and the earliest flowers; but after our long winters what can be more natural than such pleasure?  The companionship of this so-called spirit has nothing so very extraordinary in it, has it, my child?”

“The secrets of that spirit are not mine,” said Minna.  “Near it I know all, away from it I know nothing; near that exquisite life I am no longer myself, far from it I forget all.  The time we pass together is a dream which my memory scarcely retains.  I may have heard yet not remember the music which the women tell of; in that presence, I may have breathed celestial perfumes, seen the glory of the heavens, and yet be unable to recollect them here.”

“What astonishes me most,” resumed the pastor, addressing Wilfrid, “is to notice that you suffer from being near her.”