‘You don’t understand me yet, and I guess you never will. I’m not a European, and I haven’t been brought up like other girls. I don’t seem ever to have been quite young. I grew friends with the spirits when I wasn’t old enough to understand, and they seem to have stolen my right heart away, and put another in its place.’
‘Why do you speak of such things as if they were real? You know the whole thing is a trick and a lie.’
‘No, I don’t,’ she answered quickly. ‘I’m not denying that I’ve played tricks with _them_, just as they’ve played tricks with _me_; but they’re downright real--they are indeed. First mother used to come to me, when I was very little; then others, and in after-days I saw _him_; yes, after he was dead. Then sometimes, when they wouldn’t come, Salem helped out the manifestations, that’s all.’
‘For God’s sake, be honest with me!’ cried Bradley. ‘Confess that all these things are simple imposture. That photograph of yourself, for example--do you remember?--the picture your brother left in my room, and which faded away when I breathed upon it?’ She nodded her head again, and laughed strangely.
‘It was a man out West that taught Salem how to do that,’ she replied naïvely.
‘Yes, I guess that was a trick. It was something they used in fixing the likeness, which made it grow invisible after it had been a certain time in contact with the atmospheric air.’
Bradley uttered an impatient exclamation.
‘And all the rest was of a piece with that! Well, I could have forgiven you everything but having personified one who is now lost to me for ever.’
‘I never did. I suppose you _wished_ to see her, and she came to you out of the spirit-land.’
‘Don’t you think I’m lying,’ was the answer; ‘for its gospel-truth I’m telling you. I’m not so bad as you think me, not half so bad.’
Again shrinking from lier, lie looked at her with aimer and loathing.
‘The device was exposed to-day,’ he said sternly. ‘You spoke to me with her voice, and when I turned up the light I found that I was holding in my arms no spirit, but yourself.’
‘Well, I’m not denying that’s true,’ she answered with another laugh. ‘Something came over me--I don’t know how it happened--and then, all at one, I was kissing you, and I had broken the conditions.’