pity."

"Then you feel that she is really there? That she exists outside of his
mind?"

"How can I tell? What do any of us know of the world beyond? She exists
as much as I exist to you or you to me. Isn't thought all that there
is--all that we know?"

This was deeper than I could follow; but in order not to appear stupid,
I murmured sympathetically.

"And does she make him unhappy when she comes?"

"She is killing him--and me. I believe that is why she does it."

"Are you sure that she could stay away? When he thinks of her isn't she
obliged to come back?"

"Oh, I've asked that question over and over! In spite of his calling her
so unconsciously, I believe she comes of her own will. I have always the
feeling--it has never left me for an instant--that she could appear
differently if she would. I have studied her for years until I know her
like a book, and though she is only an apparition, I am perfectly
positive that she wills evil to us both. Don't you think he would change
that if he could? Don't you think he would make her kind instead of
vindictive if he had the power?"

"But if he could remember her as loving and tender?"

"I don't know. I give it up--but it is killing me."

It _was_ killing her. As the days passed I began to realize that she had
spoken the truth. I watched her bloom fade slowly and her lovely
features grow pinched and thin like the features of a starved person.
The harder she fought the apparition, the more I saw that the battle was
a losing one, and that she was only wasting her strength. So impalpable
yet so pervasive was the enemy that it was like fighting a poisonous
odour. There was nothing to wrestle with, and yet there was everything.
The struggle was wearing her out--was, as she had said, actually
"killing her"; but the physician who dosed her daily with drugs--there
was need now of a physician--had not the faintest idea of the malady he
was treating. In those dreadful days I think that even Mr. Vanderbridge
hadn't a suspicion of the truth. The past was with him so constantly--he
was so steeped in the memories of it that the present was scarcely more
than a dream to him. It was, you see, a reversal of the natural order of
things; the thought had become more vivid to his perceptions than any
object. The phantom had been victorious so far, and he was like a man
recovering from the effects of a narcotic. He was only half awake, only
half alive to the events through which he lived