And even with so slight a conscious registering, _it_ seemed to disappear. Like a whale that has sounded to the bottomless seas. That knowledge of _it_, which was the marriage of the ghost and me, disappeared from me, in its rich weight of certainty, as the scent of the plum-blossom moved down the lanes of my consciousness, and my limbs stirred in a silkiness for which I have no comparison. As I became aware, I also became uncertain. I wanted to be certain of _it_, to have definite evidence. And as I sought for evidence, _it_ disappeared, my perfect knowledge was gone. I no longer knew in full. Now as the daylight slowly amassed, in the windows from which I had put back the shutters, I sought in myself for evidence, and in the room. But I shall never know. I shall never know if it was a ghost, some sweet spirit from the innermost of the ever-deepening cosmos; or a woman, a very woman, as the silkiness of my limbs seems to attest; or a dream, a hallucination! I shall never know. Because I went away from Riddings in the morning, on account of the sudden illness of Lady Lathkill. "You will come again," Luke said to me. "And in any case, you will never really go away from us." "Good-bye," she said to me. "At last it was perfect!" She seemed so beautiful, when I left her, as if it were the ghost again, and I was far down the deeps of consciousness. The following autumn, when I was overseas once more, I had a letter from Lord Lathkill. He wrote very rarely. "Carlotta has a son," he said, "and I an heir. He has yellow hair, like a little crocus, and one of the young plum-trees in the orchard has come out of all season into blossom. To me he is flesh and blood of our ghost itself. Even mother doesn't look over the wall, to the other side, any more. It's all this side for her now. "So our family refuses to die out, by the grace of our ghost. We are calling him Gabriel. "Dorothy Hale also is a mother, three days before Carlotta. She has a black lamb of a daughter, called Gabrielle. By the bleat of the little thing, I know its father. Our own is a blue-eyed one, with the dangerous repose of a pugilist. I have no fears of our family misfortune for him, ghost-begotten and ready-fisted. "The Colonel is very well, quiet and self-possessed. He is farming in Wiltshire, raising pigs. It is a passion with him, the crême de la crême of swine. I admit, he has golden sows as elegant as a young Diane de Poitiers, and young hogs like Perseus in the first red-gold flush of youth. He looks me in the eye, and I look him back, and we understand. He is quiet, and proud now, and very hale and hearty, raising swine _ad maiorem gloriam Dei_. A good sport!