still without
words, she said:

"I thought I heard a voice like--like----"

"Yes," answered the Dead Man again, "you wanted me, little girl. That's
why I have come. There, there!" he soothed, as she stood with troubled
face trying to formulate and understand the strange sensation that had
suddenly taken possession of her. "Don't worry, Katje. It'll come out
all right. We'll arrange things very differently. I've come back to----"

She moved away, unhearing. She passed unseeing from the loving
outstretched arms.

"Katje!" he called tenderly.

But she did not turn at the loving appeal in his soundless voice.

"Oh, Katje! Katje!" he pleaded, following her. "Can't I make my presence
known to you? Oh, _don't_ cry!"

For the tears had welled up, unbidden, in her eyes.

And this time his words, in a vague, roundabout way, seemed to reach her
understanding.

"Oh, well," she sighed, drying her eyes. "Crying doesn't help."

"Ah!" exclaimed Peter Grimm eagerly. "Good! _Good!_ She hears me! Smile,
little girl! _Smile_, I say."

A trembling ghost of a smile played about her sad lips.

"That's right!" he encouraged. "Smile! _Smile!_ You haven't smiled
before since I--since I found there was a place a million times happier
and lovelier and more wonderful than this world that I left. Listen,
little girl! Listen, Katje, and try to understand me. _There are no
dead._ We never _really_ die. We couldn't if we tried to. See the
gardens out there. Look!"

As if in response to his words, Kathrien's half-smiling face was turned
toward the flowering garden beds that stretched away on every hand,
just outside the window.

"See the gardens," he went on, glad at his own seeming success in
catching and holding her attention. "They die. But they come back all
the better for it. All the fresher and younger and more beautiful. What
people call death is nothing more than a nap. We wake from it
freshened--rested--made over again. It's a wonderful sleep that people
fall into, old and slow and tired out. And they spring up from it like
happy children tumbling out of bed,--ready to frolic through another
world. It is as foolish and wrong to mourn for people who fall into that
dear sleep as to mourn for the children when they close their eyes at
the end of the day. _There is no death._ There are no dead. It is all
rest and wonder and beauty and perfect bliss. So stop being sad for me,
my own little girl!

"There!" he cried in triumph, as