It was a circumstance calculated at least to arrest attention, that these seven people, each unknown to the others, and without concert with the others, repeated the ugly message which had sought me out through the happy summer morning in Washington Street.  There was no hesitation, no doubt, no contradiction.  I could not trip them or cross-question them out of it.  Unerring, assured, and consistent, the fiat went forth:—­

“On the second of May, at one o’clock in the afternoon, you will pass out of the body.”

I would not have believed them if I could have helped myself, I sighed for the calm days when I had laughed at medium and prophet, and sneered at ghost and rapping.  I took lodgings in Philadelphia, locked my doors, and paced my rooms all day and half the night, tortured by my thoughts, and consulting books of medicine to discover what evidence I could by any possibility give of unsuspected disease.  I was at that time absolutely well and strong; absolutely well and strong I was forced to confess myself, after having waded through Latin adjectives and anatomical illustrations enough to make a ghost of Hercules.  I devoted two days to researches in genealogical pathology, and was rewarded for my pains by discovering myself to be the possessor of one great-aunt who had died of heart disease at the advanced age of two months.

Heart disease, then, I settled upon.  The alternative was accident.  “Which will it be?” I asked in vain.  Upon this point my friends the mediums held a delicate reserve.  “The Influences were confusing, and they were not prepared to state with exactness.”

“Why don’t you come home?” my wife wrote in distress and perplexity.  “You promised to come ten days ago, and they need you at the office, and I need you more than anybody.”

“I need you more than anybody!” When the little clinging needs of three weeks grew into the great want of a lifetime,—­O, how could I tell her what was coming?

I did not tell her.  When I had hurried home, when she came bounding through the hall to meet me, when she held up her face, half laughing, half crying, and flushing and paling, to mine,—­the poor little face that by and by would never watch and glow at my coming,—­I could not tell her.

When the children were in bed and we were alone after tea, she climbed gravely up into my lap from the little cricket on which she had been sitting, and put her hands upon my shoulders.

“You’re sober, Fred, and pale.  Something ails you, you know, and you are going to tell me all about it.”

Her pretty, mischievous face swam suddenly before my eyes.  I kissed it, put her gently down as I would a child, and went away alone till I felt more like myself.

The winter set in gloomily enough.  It may have been the snow-storms, of which we had an average of one every other day, or it may have been the storm in my own heart which I was weathering alone.