Miss Mary Pask by Edith Wharton

When I was well enough to trust myself to think about it all again I / found that a very little thinking got my temperature up, and my heart / hammering in my throat. No use. I simply couldn't stand it. for / I'd seen Grace Bridgeworth in crape, weeping over the cable, and yet I'd / sat and talked with her sister, on the same sofa-her sister who'd been / dead a year!

The circle was a vicious one; I couldn't break through it. The fact that / I was down with fever the next morning might have explained it; yet I / couldn't get away from the clinging reality of the vision. Supposing it / _was_ a ghost I had been talking to, and not a mere projection of my / fever? Supposing something survived of Mary Pask-enough to cry out to me / the unuttered loneliness of a lifetime, to express at last what the / living woman had always had to keep dumb and hidden? The thought moved / me curiously-in my weakness I lay and wept over it. No end of women were / like that, I supposed, and perhaps, after death, if they got their / chance they tried to use it. Old tales and legends floated through my / mind; the bride of Corinth, the mediaeval vampire-but what names to / attach to the plaintive image of Mary Pask!

My weak mind wandered in and out among these visions and conjectures, / and the longer I lived with them the more convinced I became that / something _which had been Mary Pask_ had talked with me that night. I / made up my mind, when I was up again, to drive back to the place (in / broad daylight, this time), to hunt out the grave in the garden-that / "shady corner where the sun never bothers one"-and appease the poor / ghost with a few flowers. But the doctors decided otherwise; and perhaps / my weak will unknowingly abetted them. At any rate, I yielded to their / insistence that I should be driven straight from my hotel to the train / for Paris, and thence transshipped, like a piece of luggage, to the / Swiss sanatorium they had in view for me. Of course I meant to come back / when I was patched up again. and meanwhile, more and more tenderly, / but more intermittently, my thoughts went back from my snow-mountain to / that wailing autumn night above the _Baie des Trépassés_, and the / revelation of the dead Mary Pask who was so much more real to me than / ever the living one had been.