nothing, formed no plan, considered no eventuality. Things were so wholly out of her experience that she had no process whereby to deal with them. Just two words came over and over again before her consciousness—courage and love.
She looked again at the door.
Laurie was there, she said. Then she questioned herself. Was it Laurie? …
“He is there, underneath,” she whispered to herself softly; “he is waiting for me to help him.” She remembered that she must make that act of faith. Yet was it Laurie who had looked in at his mother’s door? … Well, the door was locked now. But that secretive visit seemed to her terrible.
What, then, did she believe?
She had put that question to herself fifty times, and found no answer.
The old man’s solution was clear enough now: he believed no less than that out of that infinitely mysterious void that lies beyond the veils of sense there had come a Personality, strong, malignant, degraded, and seeking to degrade, seizing upon this lad’s soul, in the disguise of a dead girl, and desiring to possess it.
How fantastic that sounded! Did she believe it? She did not know.
Then there was the solution of a nervous strain, rising to a climax of insanity. This was the answer of the average doctor. Did she believe that? Was that enough to account for the look in the boy’s eyes? She did not know.
She understood perfectly that the fact of herself living under conditions of matter made the second solution the more natural; yet that did not content her.