Wessington. "Agnes," said I, "will you put back your hood and tell me what it
all means?" The hood dropped noiselessly, and I was face to face with my dead
and buried mistress. She was wearing the dress in which I had last seen her
alive; carried the same tiny handkerchief in her right hand; and the same
cardcase in her left. (A woman eight months dead with a cardcase!) I had to
pin myself down to the multiplication-table, and to set both hands on the
stone parapet of the road, to assure myself that that at least was real.
"Agnes," I repeated, "for pity's sake tell me what it all means." Mrs.
Wessington leaned forward, with that odd, quick turn of the head I used to
know so well, and spoke.
If my story had not already so madly overleaped the hounds of all human belief
I should apologize to you now. As I know that no one--no, not even Kitty, for
whom it is written as some sort of justification of my conduct--will believe
me, I will go on. Mrs. Wessington spoke and I walked with her from the
Sanjowlie road to the turning below the Commander-in-Chief's house as I might
walk by the side of any living woman's 'rickshaw, deep in conversation. The
second and most tormenting of my moods of sickness had suddenly laid hold upon
me, and like the Prince in Tennyson's poem, "I seemed to move amid a world of
ghosts.
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