We said nothing about it but Selphar did.  The delusion, if delusion it were, clung to her, haunted her, pursued her, week after week.  To rid her of it, or to silence her, was impossible.  She added no new facts to her first statement, but insisted that the long-lost dead was yet alive, with a quiet pertinacity that it was simply impossible to ridicule, frighten, threaten, or cross-question out of her.  Clara was so thoroughly alarmed that she would not have slept alone for any mortal—­perhaps not for any immortal—­considerations.  Winthrop and I talked the matter over often and gravely when we were alone and in quiet places.  Mother’s lips were sealed.  From the day when Sel made the first disclosure, she was never heard once to refer to the matter.  A perceptible haughtiness crept into her manner towards the girl.  She even talked of dismissing her, but repented it, and melted into momentary gentleness.  I could have cried over her that night.  I was beginning to understand what a pitiful struggle her life had become, and how alone she must be in it.  She would not believe—­she knew not what.  She could not doubt the girl.  And with the conflict even her children could not intermeddle.

To understand the crisis into which she was brought, the reader must bear in mind our long habit of belief, not only in Selphar’s personal honesty, but in the infallibility of her mysterious power.  Indeed, it had almost ceased to be mysterious to us, from daily familiarity.  We had come to regard it as the curious working of physical disease, had taken its results as a matter of course, and had ceased, in common with converted Creston, to doubt the girl’s capacity for seeing anything that she chose to, at any place.

Thus a year worried on.  My mother grew sleepless and pallid.  She laughed often, in a nervous, shallow way, as unlike her as a butterfly is unlike a sunset; and her face settled into an habitual sharpness and hardness unutterably painful to me.

Once only I ventured to break into the silence of the haunting thought that, she knew and we knew, was never escaped by either.  “Mother, it would do no harm for Winthrop to go out West, and—­”

She interrupted me sternly:  “Sarah, I had not thought you capable of such childish superstition, I wish that girl and her nonsense had never come into this house!”—­turning sharply away, and out of the room.

But year and struggle ended.  They ended at last, as I had prayed every night and morning of it that they should end.  Mother came into my room one night, locked the door behind her, and walking over to the window, stood with her face turned from me, and softly spoke my name.

But that was all, for a little while.  Then,—­“Sick and in suffering, Sarah!  The girl,—­she may be right; God Almighty knows! Sick and in suffering, you see!  I am going—­I think.”  Then her voice broke.

Creston put on its spectacles and looked wise on learning, the next day, that Mrs. Dugald had taken the earliest morning train for the West, on sudden and important business.  It was precisely what Creston expected, and just like the Dugalds for all the world—­gone to hunt up material for that genealogical book, or map, or tree, or something, that they thought nobody knew they were going to publish.  O yes, Creston understood it perfectly.