he ground, he stood still, looking at
it very hard. Suddenly, to my surprise, he seemed to understand
something, to _comprehend_ it fully and delightedly. He laughed." Strang
stopped, looking intently at his wife.

"I can imagine that laugh," she mused.

Strang shook his head. "I don't think you can. It--it wasn't pleasant.
It was as uncanny as the rest of the little chap--a long, rattling,
eerie sound, as if a tree should groan or a butterfly curse; but
wait--there's more." In his earnestness Strang sat up, adding, "Then
Gargoyle got up and stretched out his hands, not to the sky, but to the
air all around him. It was as if--" Here Strang, the normal, healthy man
of the world, hesitated; it was only the father of the little boy who
had died who admitted in low tones: "You would have said--At least even
_I_ could imagine that Gargoyle--well--that he _saw_ something like a
released principle of life fly happily back to its main source--as if a
little mote like a sunbeam should detach itself from a clod and,
disembodied, dart back to its law of motion."

For a long time they were silent, listening to the call of an oven-bird
far back in the spring trees. At last Strang got up, filled his pipe,
and puffed at it savagely before he said, "Of course the whole thing's
damned nonsense." He repeated that a little brutally to his wife's
silence before in softened voice he added, "Only, perhaps you're right,
Evelyn; perhaps we, too, should be seeing that kind of thing,
understanding what, God knows, we long to understand, if we had
'undressed minds,' if we hadn't from earliest infancy been smeared all
over with the plaster-of-Paris of 'normal thinking.'"

Time flew swiftly by. The years at Heartholm were tranquil and happy
until Strang, taken by one of the swift maladies which often come to men
of his type, was mortally stricken. His wife at first seemed to feel
only the strange ecstasy that sometimes comes to those who have beheld
death lay its hand on a beloved body. She went coldly, rigidly, through
every detail of the final laying away of the man who had loved her to
the utmost power of his man's heart. Friends waited helplessly, dreading
the furious after-crash of this unnatural mental and bodily endurance.
Doctor Milton, Strang's life-long friend, who had fought for the
banker's life, watched her carefully, but there was no catalepsy, no
tranced woman held in a vise of endurance. Nothing Evelyn Strang did was
odd or unna