"'How beautiful it is to live, to watch the changing seasons in this
strange new world untouched by sickness or death or sin. And yet,' she
convulsively clasped her face, 'what beauty, what peace, what
sinlessness can replace the only life--the Life of Love?
"'And then my boy! Can it be possible that I may see him! Why, now he
will seem only a brother in this new youth in which I have been born,
and yet--and yet--the mother feeling is unchanged; the old yearning,
just as when I left him a boy upon the Earth seems as great as ever.
"'Oh! when shall this waiting all end in our reunion--father, mother,
son--and all strong and glad in youth and hope?'
"She rose and stretched out her arms toward some phantasy of thought or
fancy in the air above her, and then a song of recall from a distance
floated along the meadow and the river's banks, a sweet, joyous,
beckoning melody, that compelled the ear to listen, and the feet to
follow.
"Martha half turned--I was dazed with wonder--I did not wish to speak. I
could not then have revealed myself. It was all too marvellous, too hard
to comprehend. The old doubts of my reality, of the realness of
everything I had seen, surged up again, and swept over me in a tide of
disillusion.
"Was I dreaming; in the death from Earth had I passed into a wild
phantasmagoria of mental pictures, some endless dream where the lulled
soul encountered again, as visions, all it may have hoped for, all its
unconscious cerebration had limned on the interior canvases of the mind,
to be reviewed, as in a sleep, where every detail met the test of
curiosity--except that last test--waking? Should I awake?
"I sprang forward and beat myself, in a sort of fury of doubt against
the trees about me.
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