She's here!—That's she!—Why did she—How changed! How could it be—"
It seemed to Barney that every one must recognize that she was before them in the body; yet so strong had been the spell of the illusion that a few still saw her as a phantom. Lucas Cullen did.
Not only Barney detected this, but Bennet and his mother who now realized the truth.
"It's Agnes, father!" his son's wife shook him. "It's she—come back!"
"Yes," he said. "Yes; I see!" But he understood that his daughter-in-law saw Agnes too as a materialized spirit.
Barney forgot him and watched his mother. This was her moment, he knew, for which all her life she had schooled herself; this was the effort for which, in these last days, she had been preparing and driving herself; now she was to expend that, stored within her, of which even to him she had dared not speak. Probably the séance had not offered the precise opportunity which she had hoped for; undoubtedly Barney's own interference with the departure of the Cullens had been unexpected; but Barney was sure that, on the whole, it was as she had wished. When she spoke on, he recognized that her deliberate, careful words were being recited from rehearsals within herself repeated through years of waiting for such a moment.
"My father," she said, "had abandoned farming to take out lumber, cutting from land he had homesteaded and from surrounding sections which he bought. You could buy timber land cheap in those days—two dollars and a half an acre; the State practically gave it away; but there were men who thought it foolish to pay the government anything at all for the great
