Secretly, within his inmost, Hewson felt justly punished by the laughter.
He had been unworthy of his apparition in lightly exposing it to such a
chance; he had fallen below the dignity of his experience. He might never
hope to fathom its meaning while he lived; but he grieved for the wrong
he had done it, as if at the instant of the apparition he had offered
that majestic, silent figure some grotesque indignity: thrown a pillow at
it, or hailed it in tones of mocking offence. He was profoundly and
exquisitely ashamed even before he ceased to tell the story for his
listeners' idle amusement. When he stopped doing so, and snubbed
solicitation with the curt answer that everybody had heard that story, he
was retrospectively ashamed; and mixed with the expectation of seeing the
vision again was the formless wish to offer it some sort of reparation,
of apology.

He longed to prove himself not wholly unworthy of the advance that had
been made him from the other world upon grounds which he had done his
worst to prove untenable. He could not imagine what the grounds were,
though he had to admit their probable existence; such an event might have
no obvious or present significance, but it had not happened for nothing;
it could not have happened for nothing. Hewson might not have been in
what he thought any stressful need of ghostly comfort or reassurance in
matters of faith. He was not inordinately agnostic, or in the way of
becoming so. He was simply an average skeptical American, who denied no
more than he affirmed, and who really concerned himself so little about
his soul, though he tried to keep his conscience decently clean, that he
had not lately asked whether other people had such a thing or not. He had
not lost friends, and he was so much alone in this world that it seemed
improbable the fate of any uncle or cousin, in the absence of more
immediate kindred, should be mystically forecast to him. He was perfectly
well at the time of the apparition, and it could not have been the