that the impression was even stronger than before, but, of course, by then she realized it was an hallucination. But they felt it too! Why how perfectly uncanny!
“Mary thinks it was Jay,” Andrew told her.
“Why, I…”
“So does Aunt Hannah.”
“Why how-how perfectly extraordinary, Andrew!”
“She thinks he was worried about…”
“Oh, Andrew!” Mary cried. “Andrew Please let’s don’t talk about it any more! Do you mind?”
He looked at her as if he had been slapped. “Why, Mary, of course not!” He explained to his mother: “Mary’d rather we didn’t discuss it any more.”
“Oh, it’s not that, Andrew. It just-means so much more than anything we can say about it or even think about it. I’d give anything just to sit quiet and think about it a little while! Don’t you see? It’s as if we were driving him away when he wants so much to be here among us, with us, and can’t.”
“I’m awfully sorry, Mary. Just awfully sorry. Yes, of course I do see. It’s a kind of sacrilege.”
So they sat quietly and in the silence they began to listen again. At first there was nothing, but after a few minutes Hannah whispered, “He’s there,” and Andrew whispered, “Where?” and Mary said quietly, “With the children,” and quietly and quickly left the room.
When she came through the door of the children’s room she could feel his presence as strongly throughout the room as if she had opened a furnace door: the presence of his strength, of virility, of helplessness, and of pure calm. She fell down on her knees in the middle of the floor and whispered, “Jay. My dear. My dear one. You’re all right now, darling. You’re not troubled any more, are you, my darling? Not any more. Not ever any more, dearest. I can feel how it
