What I am about to relate happened on a night.  We know when it is night, for then you retire to your houses and we can venture from our places of concealment to move unafraid about our old homes, to look in at the windows, even to enter and gaze upon your faces as you sleep.  I had lingered long near the dwelling where I had been so cruelly changed to what I am, as we do while any that we love or hate remain.  Vainly I had sought some method of manifestation, some way to make my continued existence and my great love and poignant pity understood by my husband and son.  Always if they slept they would wake, or if in my desperation I dared approach them when they were awake, would turn toward me the terrible eyes of the living, frightening me by the glances that I sought from the purpose that I held.

On this night I had searched for them without success, fearing to find them; they were nowhere in the house, nor about the moonlit lawn.  For, although the sun is lost to us forever, the moon, full-orbed or slender, remains to us.  Sometimes it shines by night, sometimes by day, but always it rises and sets, as in that other life.

I left the lawn and moved in the white light and silence along the road, aimless and sorrowing.  Suddenly I heard the voice of my poor husband in exclamations of astonishment, with that of my son in reassurance and dissuasion; and there by the shadow of a group of trees they stood—­near, so near!  Their faces were toward me, the eyes of the elder man fixed upon mine.  He saw me—­at last, at last, he saw me!  In the consciousness of that, my terror fled as a cruel dream.  The death-spell was broken:  Love had conquered Law!  Mad with exultation I shouted—­I must have shouted, “He sees, he sees:  he will understand!” Then, controlling myself, I moved forward, smiling and consciously beautiful, to offer myself to his arms, to comfort him with endearments, and, with my son’s hand in mine, to speak words that should restore the broken bonds between the living and the dead.

Alas! alas! his face went white with fear, his eyes were as those of a hunted animal.  He backed away from me, as I advanced, and at last turned and fled into the wood—­whither, it is not given to me to know.

To my poor boy, left doubly desolate, I have never been able to impart a sense of my presence.  Soon he, too, must pass to this Life Invisible and be lost to me forever.

A DIAGNOSIS OF DEATH

“I am not so superstitious as some of your physicians—­men of science, as you are pleased to be called,” said Hawver, replying to an accusation that had not been made.  “Some of you—­only a few, I confess—­believe in the immortality of the soul, and in apparitions which you have not the honesty to call ghosts.  I go no further than a conviction that the living are sometimes seen where they are not, but have been—­where they have lived so long, perhaps so intensely, as to have left their impress on everything about them.  I know, indeed, that one’s environment may be so affected by one’s personality as to yield, long afterward, an image of one’s self to the eyes of another.  Doubtless the impressing personality has to be the right kind of personality as the perceiving eyes have to be the right kind of eyes—­mine, for example.”