"Why should I heed him?" she said to
herself. "He is dead. I am only in a dream. This is not he; it is
but his pitiful phantom that comes wandering hither--a ghost
without a heart, made out of the moonlight. It is nothing. I am
nothing. I am lost. Everything is an empty dream of loss. I know
it, and there is no waking. If there were, surely the sight of
him would give me some shimmer of delight. The old time was but a
thicker dream, and this is truer because more shadowy." And, the
form still standing by her, she felt it was ages away; she was
divided from it by a gulf of very nothingness. Her only life was,
that she was lost. Her whole consciousness was merest, all but
abstract, loss.
Then came the form of her mother, and bent over that of her
brother from behind. "Another ghost of a ghost! another shadow of
a phantom!" she said to herself. "She is nothing to me. If I
speak to her, she is not there. Shall I pour out my soul into the
ear of a mist, a fume from my own brain? Oh, cold creatures, ye
are not what ye seem, and I will none of you!"
With that, came her father, and stood beside the others, gazing
upon her with still, cold eyes, expressing only a pale quiet. She
bowed her face on her hands, and would not regard him. Even if he
were alive, her heart was past being moved. It was settled into
stone. The universe was sunk in one of the dreams that haunt the
sleep of death; and, if these were ghosts at all, they were
ghosts walking in their sleep.
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