“No,” said Lucy, “certainly not! Not in that way. The dead have cast off their bodies, and if they do hold any communication with us, it must be as if we too were out of the flesh.” “My father always said we had no call to have any dealings with the blessed dead,” remarked Clementina. “We never had any portrait of Niel. But after he was killed, Rachel’s sweetheart sent us home a little one in a case. It had been taken after Niel was in India. But when my father saw what it was, he wouldn’t take a second look. After the neighbours had been told about the death, my father never named Niel again. He never spoke of our mother.” And Clementina sighed and went about her business. Lucy drew a long breath. The mere thought of such suppressed existence seemed to choke her. There may be danger of righteous indignation or strong emotion merely frittering itself away in the “soft luxurious flow” of too copious expression. A deep thinker has cautioned us. “Prune thou thy words, the thoughts control That o’er thee swell and throng: They will condense within thy soul And change to purpose strong.” But merely to smother and bury is not to control and direct. It is rather to deprive healthful force of its lawful function, and to screen fevered force from wholesome cure. Surely speech is to the mind as an opened window is to a chamber. If the chamber be fresh already, then its freshness but meets newer freshness. If it be filled with noxious vapours, they escape and fresh air enters. It struck Lucy, too, as singular how this Highland father and daughter, unlike the Brands in every other respect, yet resembled them in one particular. These Gillespies had clearly been gloomy people, narrow of creed, strict in life, staunch alike in love and in hatred. The Brands were frivolous, practically creedless, moving at the breath of every social wind, their emotions floating like bubbles on the surface. Yet both the Brands and the Gillespies kept silence over “the dead.” They shut up their names and their memories in the tomb. It had often pained Lucy to realise that in her sister’s silence her own recollections of her early home were fading. When we so inevitably soon pass out of hearing of those who have shared a common past, Lucy felt much should be made of that treasury, while two remain to turn it over. Apart from the attractions of Mrs. Bray’s quaintness and elfishness, the old lady had for Lucy the supreme attraction that she remembered Lucy’s parents, and seldom saw her without making bright reference to some saying or doing of “your father” or “your mother.” But when Florence was forced to mention these parents, it was always in a whisper—such as Lucy would have used in naming a painful subject. And she invariably said “poor papa,” “poor mamma,” as if Death—as universal as birth—can, in itself, be a misfortune.