7.  She not only saw substance, but soul.  She has repeatedly told me my thoughts when they were upon subjects to which she could not by any possibility have had the slightest clew.

8.  We were never able to detect a shadow of deceit about her.

9.  The clairvoyance never failed in any instance to be correct, so far as we were able to trace it.

As will be readily imagined, the girl became a useful member of the family.  The lost valuables restored and the warnings against mischances given by her quite balanced her incapacity for peculiar kinds of work.  This incapacity, however, rather increased than diminished; and, together with her fickle health, which also grew more unsettled, caused us a great deal of care.  The Creston physician—­who was a keen man in his way, for a country doctor—­pronounced the case altogether undreamt of before in Horatio’s philosophy, and kept constant notes of it.  Some of these have, I believe, found their way into the medical journals.

After a while there came, like a thief in the night, that which I suppose was poor Selphar’s one unconscious, golden mission in this world.  It came on a quiet summer night, that ended a long trance of a week’s continuance.  Mother had gone out into the kitchen to give an order for breakfast.  I heard a few eager words in Selphar’s voice, and then the door shut quickly, and it was an hour before it was opened.

Then my mother came to me without a particle of color in lips or cheek, and drew me away alone, and told the secret to me.

Selphar had seen Aunt Alice.

We sat down and looked at one another.  There was a singular, pinched look about my mother’s mouth.

“Sarah.”

“Yes.”

“She says”—­and then she told me what she said.  She had seen Alice Stuart in a Western town, seven hundred miles away.  Among the living, she desired to be counted of the dead.  And that was all.

My mother paced the room three times back and forth, her hands locked.

“Sarah.”  There was a chill in her voice—­it had been such a gentle voice!—­that froze me.  “Sarah, the girl is an impostor.”

“Mother!”

She paced the room once more, three times, back and forth.  “At any rate, she is a poor, self-deluded creature.  How can she see, seven hundred miles away, a dead woman who has been an angel all these years?  Think! an angel, Sarah!  So much better than I, and I—­I loved—­”

Before or since, I never heard my mother speak like that.  She broke off sharply, and froze back into her chilling voice.

“We will say nothing about this, if you please.  I do not believe a word of it.”