Page:Weird Tales Volume 7 Number 3 (1926-03).djvu/87

Rh the middle of the afternoon, being quite spent mentally and physically, I lay down on the couch in my study to snatch an hour or so of needful rest.

I awoke from a deep sleep with a sense of something momentous having happened—a feeling that the presence of the night before had again visited my room. Indeed, I had a conviction that it was still there; a wondrous new feeling that I was not alone.

I sprang to my feet to look about me and discovered an exhilarating buoyancy pervading my whole being. I was no longer my old self, I knew that. A wonderful sense of sympathy and power thrilled me. I wondered trembling if what I madly surmised had actually happened. Was I now changed into what I always should have been?

I walked out into the hall. Through the old-fashioned stained glass transom the golden sunshine was filtering upon me just as it had fallen upon Philip and me as we stood there years ago, when he had pointed out to me the difference in our eyes. I brought my eyes to a level with their reflection in the wall mirror and started back, struck dumb with joy.

The eyes that looked back at me from the mirror no longer held the luster of a beast's, but had in them the soft changing glow of a human soul.

My housekeeper and servants must have thought me temporarily bereft of reason, the way I rushed about the place quite as jubilant as a parent who has regained a long-lost child. I telephoned Helen I was going to see her at once, that I could not wait.

As my car swept through the streets, everything around me seemed a glad new world and all the people in it akin to me in a manner they had never been before.

Helen must have had a presentiment of what had occurred, or else my very tone of voice over the telephone had apprized her of what I came to prove.

"Amos," she cried as she came to my outstretched arms, "it has—it has happened!"

I shall not dilate upon the many delights of the very recent hours of reunion we enjoyed. Suffice it to state that our wedding is set for six weeks from today and we both feel like persons who have emerged from a dark cloud to a bright, sunlit world of happiness.

I am in the transports of the greatest joy I have ever known—tonight, when by all the calls of good form, even decency, I should be torn by deep grief. For, on my return from calling on Helen, I found a telegram awaiting me which announced the death in San Francisco of my twin brother Philip at 3 o'clock this afternoon, following a short, sudden illness, from which his life had been despaired of since the afternoon of the day before.

Tonight I know what was behind it all—a stranger fate than I have ever heard or read of befalling any other man. Here, beside me on my writing desk, lies tangible substantiation of what, to make the record complete for others, I have had thus to detail at some length. It is a message from the dead which must have deeply puzzled every telegrapher who handled it en route:

"Philip's last request was: 'Wire Amos to observe his reflection in the wall mirror in the hall and note if there is a change in the luster of his eyes. Tell him I have been detaching and willing to him his share of the twin soul that I drew wholly to myself, by force of a slightly greater physical bulk, while we were being separated by the surgeon after birth.