As for her attitude toward him--whether or not she was in love with
him--she was too busy thinking about him to bother her head about
attitudes or degrees of affection. All the girl knew--when she
permitted herself to think of herself--was that she missed him
dreadfully. Otherwise her concern was chiefly for him, for his
happiness and well-being. Also she was concerned regarding the promise
she had made him--and to which he usually referred in his
letters,--the promise to try to learn more about this faculty of hers
for clear vision, and, if possible, to employ it for his sake and in
his unhappy service.
This often preoccupied her, troubled her. She did not know how to go
about it; she hesitated to seek those who advertised their alleged
occult powers for sale,--trance-mediums, mind-readers, palmists--all
the heterogeneous riffraff lurking always in metropolitan purlieus,
and always with a sly weather-eye on the police.
As usual in her career since the time she could first remember, she
continued to "see clearly" where others saw and heard nothing.
Faint voices in the dusk, a whisper in darkness; perhaps in her bedroom
the subtle intuition of another presence. And sometimes a touch on her
arm, a breath on her cheek, delicate, exquisite--sometimes the haunting
sweetness of some distant harmony, half heard, half divined. And now and
then a form, usually unknown, almost always smiling and friendly, visible
for a few moments--the space of a fire-fly's incandescence--then
fading--entering her orbit out of nothing and, going into nothing,
out of it.
Of these episodes she had never entertained any fear. Sometimes they
interested her, sometimes even slightly amused her. But they had never
saddened her, not even when they had been the flash-lit harbingers of
death. For only a sense of calmness and serenity accompanied them:
and to her they had always been part of the world and of life, nothing
to wonder at, nothing to fear, and certainly nothing to intrude
on--merely incidents not concerning her, not remarkable, but natural
and requiring no explanation.
But she herself did not know and could not explain why, even as a
child, she had been always reticent regarding these occurrences,--why
she had always been disinclined to discuss them. Unless it were a
natural embarrassment and a hesitation to discuss strangers, as though
comment were a species of indelicacy,--even of unwarranted intrusion.
One night while reading--she had been scanning a newspaper column of
advertisements hoping to find a chance for herself or Catharine--glancing
up she again saw Clive's father seated near her. At the same moment he
lifted his head, which had been resting on one hand, and looked across
the hearthstone at her, smiling faintly.