Part 45 (1/2)
”Some clients ask for it.”
”And you see things in it?”
”Yes,” said the girl simply.
”And when your clients do not demand a crystal-reading?”
”I can see perfectly well without it--when I can see clearly at all.”
”Into the future?”
”Sometimes.”
”The past, too, of course.”
”Not always.”
She fascinated the non-scientific side of this famous physician; he interested her intensely.
”Do you know,” she ventured with a faint smile, ”that you are really quite as psychically endowed as I am?”
His handsome, sanguine features flushed deeply, but he smiled in appreciation.
”Not in the manner you so saucily imply, Miss Greensleeve,” he said gaily. ”My work is sound, logical, reasonable, and based on fundamental truths capable of being proven. I never saw an apparition in my life--and believed that it was really there!”
”Oh! So you _have_ seen an apparition?”
”None that could have really existed independently of my own vision.
In other words it wouldn't have been there at all if I hadn't supposed I had seen it.”
”You _did_ suppose so?”
”I knew perfectly well that I didn't see it. I didn't even think I saw it.”
”But you _saw_ it?”
”I imagined I did, and at the same time I knew I didn't.”
”Yes,” she said quietly, ”you did see it, Dr. Westland. You have seen it more than once. You will see it again.”
A heavier colour dyed his face; he started impatiently as though to check her--as though to speak; and did not.
She said: ”If what I say is distasteful to you, please stop me.” She waited a moment; then, as he evinced no desire to check or interrupt her: ”I _am_ very diffident about saying this to you--to a man so justly celebrated--pre-eminent in the greatest of all professions. I am so insignificant in comparison, so unimportant, so ignorant where you are experienced and learned.
”But may I say to you that nothing dies? I am not referring to a possible spiritual world inhabited perhaps by souls. I mean that here, on this earth, all around us, nothing that has ever lived really dies.... Is what I say distasteful to you?”
He offered no reply.
”Because,” she said in a low voice, ”if I say anything more it would concern you. And what you saw.... For what you saw was alive, and real--as truly living as you and I are. It is nothing to wonder at, nothing to trouble or perplex you, to see clearly--anybody--you have ever--_loved_.”