"'Yes,' she answered steadfastly, 'I still believe. I shall always believe there is a bridge between earth and heaven--between the world we can see and touch and the world we can only feel with our hearts and minds. When I hear music like that we heard just now--those long-drawn singing notes on the violin, those deep organ tones of the 'cello--I feel myself carried away to a shadowy world where I know my father and mother are waiting for me. We shall all be together again some day, and I shall know and understand, and I shall feel her light touch upon my forehead and my hair as I have felt it so often in my dreams.' "She broke down, crying softly as she walked by my side. I soothed her as well as I could, soothed her most when I talked of those she had lost, questioning her about them. She remembered her mother dimly--a long, last illness, a pale and wasted face, and gentle hands and loving arms that used to be folded round her neck as she nestled against the sick-bed. That sick-room, and the dim light of wintry afternoons, and the sound of the harmonium as her father played soft music in an adjoining parlour, were things that seemed to have lasted for years. She could not look behind them. Her memory of mother and of home stopped on the threshold of that dimly lighted room. "Her father was a memory of yesterday. He had been her second self, the other half of her mind. "'He believed in ghosts,' she said, 'and in second sight. He has often told me how he saw my mother coming downstairs to meet him, with a shroud showing faintly above her white summer gown, the night before she broke a blood-vessel and took to her bed in her last illness.' "'An optical delusion, no doubt; but it comes natural to a Scotchman to believe such things. He should not have told you.' "'Why not? I like to know that the world we cannot see is near us. I should have died of loneliness if I had not believed my father's spirit was still within reach. I don't mind about those people being impostors. I begin to think that the friends we have lost would hardly talk to us through the moving up and down of wooden tables. It seems such a foolish way, does it not?' "'Worse than foolish; undignified. The ghosts in Virgil move and talk with a stately grandeur; Shakespeare's ghosts are kingly and awful. They strike terror. It has remained for the nineteenth century to imagine ghosts that flit about a shabby parlour and skip from side to side of the room and flutter round a table, and touch, and rap, and tap, and pat with viscous hands, like the touch of a toad. Samuel Johnson would not have sat up a whole night to see a table heaved up and down, or to be touched on the forehead by a chilly, unknown hand.' "'I don't care what you say about those things,' she answered resolutely. 'There is a link between life and death. I don't know what the link is; but though my father may be dead to all the world besides he is not dead to me.'