e are apt to talk too
much and then to blame the listener; but I had hardly taken my seat at
the tea table before she said in a hoarse voice--the cold had settled on
her chest:

"Miss Wrenn, I have wanted to ask you ever since the other evening--did
you--did you see anything unusual at dinner? From your face when you
came out I thought--I thought--"

I met this squarely. "That I might have? Yes, I did see something."

"You saw her?"

"I saw a woman come in and sit down at the table, and I wondered why no
one served her. I saw her quite distinctly."

"A small woman, thin and pale, in a grey dress?"

"She was so vague and--and misty, you know what I mean, that it is hard
to describe her; but I should know her again anywhere. She wore her hair
parted and drawn down over her ears. It was very dark and fine--as fine
as spun silk."

We were speaking in low voices, and unconsciously we had moved closer
together while my idle hands left the tea things.

"Then you know," she said earnestly, "that she really comes--that I am
not out of my mind--that it is not an hallucination?"

"I know that I saw her. I would swear to it. But doesn't Mr.
Vanderbridge see her also?"

"Not as we see her. He thinks that she is in his mind only." Then after
an uncomfortable silence, she added suddenly, "She is really a thought,
you know. She is his thought of her--but he doesn't know that she is
visible to the rest of us."

"And he brings her back by thinking of her?"

She leaned nearer while a quiver passed over her features and the flush
deepened in her cheeks. "That is the only way she comes back--the only
way she has the power to come back--as a thought. There are months and
months when she leaves us in peace because he is thinking of other
things, but of late, since his illness, she has been with him almost
constantly." A sob broke from her, and she buried her face in her hands.
"I suppose she is always trying to come--only she is too vague--and she
hasn't any form that we can see except when he thinks of her as she used
to look when she was alive. His thought of her is like that, hurt and
tragic and revengeful. You see, he feels that he ruined her life because
she died when the child was coming--a month before it would have been
born."

"And if he were to see her differently, would she change? Would she
cease to be revengeful if he stopped thinking her so?"

"God only knows. I've wondered and wondered how I might move her to