Athalie

"But," said Athalie, looking at him out of blue eyes the chiefest

beauty of which was their fearless candour, "I do not concern myself

with what is called Spiritism--with trances, table-tipping,

table-rapping, slate-writing, apparitions, reincarnations--with

cabinets, curtains, darkened rooms, psychic circles."

"You employ a crystal in your profession."

"Yes. I need not."

"Why do you do it, then?"

"Some clients ask for it."

"And you see things in it?"

"Yes," said the girl simply.

"And when your clients do not demand a crystal-reading?"

"I can see perfectly well without it--when I can see clearly at all."

"Into the future?"

"Sometimes."

"The past, too, of course."

"Not always."

She fascinated the non-scientific side of this famous physician; he

interested her intensely.

"Do you know," she ventured with a faint smile, "that you are really

quite as psychically endowed as I am?"

His handsome, sanguine features flushed deeply, but he smiled in

appreciation.

"Not in the manner you so saucily imply, Miss Greensleeve," he said

gaily. "My work is sound, logical, reasonable, and based on

fundamental truths capable of being proven. I never saw an apparition

in my life--and believed that it was really there!"

"Oh! So you have seen an apparition?"

"None that could have really existed independently of my own vision.

In other words it wouldn't have been there at all if I hadn't supposed

I had seen it."

"You did suppose so?"

"I knew perfectly well that I didn't see it. I didn't even think I saw

it."

"But you saw it?"

"I imagined I did, and at the same time I knew I didn't."

"Yes," she said quietly, "you did see it, Dr. Westland. You have seen

it more than once. You will see it again."

A heavier colour dyed his face; he started impatiently as though to

check her--as though to speak; and did not.

She said: "If what I say is distasteful to you, please stop me." She

waited a moment; then, as he evinced no desire to check or interrupt

her: "I am very diffident about saying this to you--to a man so

justly celebrated--pre-eminent in the greatest of all professions. I

am so insignificant in comparison, so unimportant, so ignorant where

you are experienced and learned.

"But may I say to you that nothing dies? I am not referring to a

possible spiritual world inhabited perhaps by souls. I mean that here,

on this earth, all around us, nothing that has ever lived really

dies.... Is what I say distasteful to you?"