ible to ridicule,
frighten, threaten, or cross-question out of her, Clara was so
thoroughly alarmed that she would not have slept alone for any
mortal--perhaps not for any immortal--considerations. Winthrop and I
talked the matter over often and gravely when we were alone and in quiet
places. Mother's lips were sealed. From the day when Sel made the first
disclosure, she was never heard once to refer to the matter. A
perceptible haughtiness crept into her manner towards the girl. She even
talked of dismissing her; but repented it, and melted into momentary
gentleness. I could have cried over her that night. I was beginning to
understand what a pitiful struggle her life had become, and how utterly
alone she must be in it. She _would_ not believe--she knew not what. She
could not doubt the girl. And with the conflict even her children could
not intermeddle.

To understand the crisis into which she was brought, the reader must
bear in mind our long habit of belief, not only in Selphar's personal
honesty, but in the infallibility of her mysterious power. Indeed, it
had almost ceased to be mysterious to us, from daily familiarity. We had
come to regard it as the curious working of physical disease, had taken
its results as a matter of course, and had ceased, in common with
converted Creston, to doubt the girl's capacity for seeing anything that
she chose to, at any place.

Thus a year wore on. My mother grew sleepless and pallid. She laughed
often, in a nervous, shallow way, as unlike her as a butterfly is unlike
a sunset; and her face settled into an habitual sharpness and hardness
unutterably painful to me.

Once only I ventured to break into the silence of the haunting thought
that she knew, and we knew, was never escaped by either. "Mother, it
would do no harm for Winthrop to go out West, and--"

She interrupted me sternly: "Sarah, I had not thought you capable of
such childish superstition. I wish that girl and her nonsense had never
come into this house!"--turning sharply away, and out of the room.

Just what that year was to my mother, I suppose only God and she have
ever known, or will know.

But it ended. It ended at last, as I had prayed every night and morning
of it that it should end. Mother came into my room one night, locked the
door behind her, and, walking over to the window, stood with her face
turned from me.

"Sarah."

"Yes."

"Sarah."

But that was all for a little while. Then,--"Sick and in