“No, never mind,” said Norcross, “it just recalls something.”  He paused the fraction of a second, and his eye grew dull.  “Wonder if they’re—­anywhere—­those people down under the tombstones?”

“I suppose we all believe in immortality.”

“Seeing and hearing is believing.  I believe what I see.  Born that way.”  Norcross was speaking with a slight, agitated jerk in his voice.  He rose now, and paced the floor, throwing out his feet in quick thrusts.  “I’m getting along, Bulger, and I’d like to know.”  More pacing.  Coming to the end of his route, he peered shrewdly into the face of the younger man.  “Have you read the Psychical Society’s report on Mrs. Fife?”

Bulger’s mind said, “Good God no!” His lips said, “Only some newspaper stuff about them.  Seemed rather remarkable if true.  Something in that stuff, I suppose.”

“I’ve read them,” resumed Norcross.  “Got the full set.  We ought to inform ourselves on such things, Bulger.  Especially when we get older.  That gravestone now.  There’s one like it—­that I know about.”  Norcross, with another jerky motion, which seemed to propel him against his will, crossed to his desk and touched a bell, bringing his secretary instantly.

“Left hand side of the vault, box marked ‘Private 3,’” he said.  Then he resumed: 

“If they could come back they would come, Bulger.  Especially those we loved.  Not to let us see them, you understand, but to assure us it is all right—­that we’ll live again.  That’s what I want—­proof—­I can’t take it on faith.”  His voice lowered.  “Thirty years!” he whispered.  “What’s thirty years?”

The secretary knocked, entered, set a small, steel box on the glass top of the desk.  Norcross dismissed him with a gesture, drew out his keys, opened the box.  It distilled a faint scent of old roses and old papers.  Norcross looked within for a moment, as though turning the scent into memories, before he took out a locket.  He opened it, hesitated, and then extended it to Bulger.  It enclosed an exquisite miniature—­a young woman, blonde, pretty in a blue-eyed, innocent way, but characterless, too—­a face upon which life had left nothing, so that even the great painter who made the miniature from a photograph had illuminated it only with technical skill.

“Don’t tell me what you think of her,” Norcross said quietly; “I prefer to keep my own ideas.  It was when I was a young freight clerk.  She taught school up there.  We were—­well, the ring’s in the box, too.  They took it off her finger when they buried her.  That’s why—­” to put the brake on his rapidly running sentiment, he ventured one of his rare pleasantries at this point—­“that’s why I’m still a stock newspaper feature as one of the great matches for ambitious society girls.”

Bulger, listening, was observing also.  Within the front cover of the case were two sets of initials in old English letters—­“R.H.N.” and “H.W.”  His mind, a little confused by its wanderings in strange fields, tried idly to match “H.W.” with names.  Suddenly he felt the necessity of expressing sympathy.