, Doctor," she said. "There _is_ an effect upon her. She can
foretell the condition of her disease. She seems conscious that her
life depends on the welfare of something else or the misfortune and
suffering of something else--beyond--that--wall."

"Poppycock!" I growled at her. "It's a pretty pass when sane medical men
in their practice begin to fancy--"

"Sh--sh!" she said, interrupting me sharply. "See! Now the child is
conscious! Watch!"

I drew back a little from the bedside as Virginia stirred, but I could
see the milk-white lids of her eyes--eyes, as I have said, deep and blue
and intense like the wall behind her, with their long black lashes. Her
slender body shook as if she was undergoing the first rippling torsions
of a convulsion. Her face was drawn into such an expression as one might
imagine would appear on the face of an angel in agony, and then,
gradually, as some renewed circulation relaxed the nerve centres, her
breath was expelled with a long patient sigh. And this I noticed,--she
did not turn toward us, but with an almost imperceptible twist of her
body and the reaching of her little hands she sought the wall.

I confess I half believed that she would float off into the infinite
blue of the plaster and be lost in its depths. I found my own eyes
following hers. I felt, I think, that I too was conscious of some
dreadful or marvelous, horrible or inspiring something behind the
partition; but in light of subsequent discoveries my memory may have
been distorted. Besides, I have promised none but the cold-blooded facts
and I need only assert that the little girl looked, moved her lips,
stretched her arms, and then suddenly, as if she had sensed some agony,
some fearful turbulence, she cried out softly, her face grew white, her
upper lip trembled, she fell back, if one may so speak of an inch of
movement, and lay panting on her pillow. The nurse, I think, seized the
moment to renew the cold applications. Yet I, who had scoffed, who had
sneered at poor MacMechem's perplexity, stood looking at that blank blue
wall, expecting to see it become transparent, to see it open and some
uncanny thing emerge, holding out to little Virginia a promise of life
or a sentence of death.

My first instinct would have endeavored to shake off the question of the
other side of that wall. I would, perhaps, if younger, have rejected the
whole impression, declared the girl delirious, and would not now be
reciting a story, the co