C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

“ If it were not the spirit of June who had come to command his allegiance, he still had a right to his warm earthly happiness with Joyce Arnold. But if it were indeed her spirit who claimed all he had to give for the rest of life, it was a fair debt and he would pay in full.
I received the detective, my old friend Smith, in another room. The necessary discussion would have been torture for Robert and intolerable for Joyce. When he left, I had at least this encouragement to give the two: it would be simple to learn what I wished to learn about Miss Reardon, on both sides of the Atlantic. ”

“ The way the voice talked didn't seem to me a bit like June. Only the tones were like hers, and they might have been imitated by anybody who'd known her, or who'd been coached by some one.”
“Dear princess, you're so anxious for our happiness that I fear you're thinking of impossible things. Who could have an object in parting Joyce and me? I can think of no one. Still less could this stranger from America have a motive, even if she lied, and really knew who I was before she spoke to us at the Savoy.” ”

“ Robert didn't even write to Joyce. I suppose he couldn't trust himself. But he wrote to me, and gave the history of his second interview with Miss Reardon. June had come again, and had reminded him of incidents about which—he said—no outsider could possibly know. He ended his letter:
I can't help believing now that there are more things in heaven and earth than I'd dreamed of in my philosophy. There's no getting around the fact that what I should have thought a miracle has happened. The spirit of June has claimed me from the other side. ”

“ Soon, however, she broke the news that she must go away. She loved me and her work, yet she couldn't stop in London—she just couldn't! Not as things were. If Robert had been turning his back on England, she might have stayed. But his promise to communicate with June daily through Opal bound him to London. Joyce thought that she might try India. She had friends there in the army and in the civil service. She might do useful work as a nurse among the native women and their babies, where mortality was big. ”

“ It was the next day—the third day after that unforgetable one at the Savoy—when my tame detective brought his budget. He would have come even sooner, he said, if there hadn't been a delay in the cable service. ”