Uncanny Stories. Sinclair May

Perhaps I only want to know what she wanted. … You did care for her, Donald?”

      I couldn’t see the phantasm now, but I could feel it, close, close, vibrating, palpitating, as I drove him.

      “Care?” he cried. “I was mad with caring for her! And she knew it.”

      “She didn’t. She wouldn’t be here now if she knew.”

      At that he turned from me to his station by the chimney-piece. I followed him there.

      “What are you going to do about it?” I said.

      “Do about it?”

      “What are you going to do with this?”

      I thrust the Token close towards him. He drew back, staring at it with a look of concentrated hate and loathing.

      “Do with it?” he said. “The damned thing killed her! This is what I’m going to do with it—”

      He snatched it from my hand and hurled it with all his force against the bars of the grate. The Buddha fell, broken to bits, among the ashes.

      He stepped forward, opening his arms.

      Then I heard him give a short, groaning cry. He stepped forward, opening his arms, and I saw the phantasm slide between them. For a second it stood there, folded to his breast; then suddenly, before our eyes, it collapsed in a shining heap, a flicker of light on the floor, at his feet.

      Then that went out too.

      III

      I never saw it again.

      Neither did my brother. But I didn’t know this till some time afterwards; for, somehow, we hadn’t cared to speak about it. And in the end it was he who spoke first.

      We were sitting together in that room, one evening in November, when he said, suddenly and irrelevantly:

      “Helen—do you never see her now?”

      “No,” I said—“Never!”

      “Do you think, then, she doesn’t come?”

      “Why should she?” I said. “She found what she came for. She knows what she wanted to know.”

      “And that—was what?”

      “Why, that you loved her.”

      His eyes had a queer, submissive, wistful look.

      “You think that was why she came back?” he said.