'Then quoth the Ka'dee, laughing until his grinders appeared: "Rather, by Allah, would I take all the punishment thou dreadest, thou most false donkey-driver of the Ruby Hills, than believe this story of thine--this mad, mad story, that she with whom thou wast seen was not the living wife of Hasan here (as these four legal witnesses have sworn), but thine own dead spouse, Alawiyah, refashioned for thee by the Angel of Memory out of thine own sorrow and unquenchable fountain of tears."
'Quoth Ja'afar, bowing low his head: "Bold is the donkey-driver, O Ka'dee! and bold the Ka'dee who dares say what he will believe, what disbelieve--not knowing in any wise the mind of Allah--not knowing in any wise his own heart and what it shall some day suffer."'
This story so absorbed me that when my father re-entered the house I was perfectly unconscious of his presence. He took the book from me, saying that it was not a book for children. It possessed my mind for some days. What I had read in it threw light upon certain conversations in French and German which I had heard between my father and his Swiss friends, and the fact gradually dawned upon me that he believed himself to be in direct communication with the spirit of his dead wife. This so acted upon my imagination that I began to feel that she was actually alive, though invisible. I told Frank when I got home that we had another mother in Switzerland, and that I our father went to Switzerland to see her.
Having at that time a passionate love for my mother (a love none the less passionate because somewhat coldly returned), I felt great anger against this resuscitated rival; but Frank only laughed and called me a stupid little fool.
Luckily Frank forgot my story in a minute, and it never reached my mother's ears.
I Some years after this an odd incident occurred. The I idea of a veiled lady had, as I say, fascinated me. One Raxton fair-day I induced Winnie to be photographed on the sands, wearing a crown of sea-flowers in imitation of Rhona Boswell's famous wild-flower coronet, and a necklace of seaweed, with Frank and another boy lifting from her head a long white veil of my mother's. My father accidentally saw this photograph, and was so taken with it that he adorned the title-page of the third edition of _The Veiled Queen_ with a small woodcut of it.