Meanwhile, the author suggested that while the spiritual essence called the Soul, being eternal, could have no age, there being no such thing as Time in Eternity, the duration of its inhabitance of matter was of different length in different cases. Courageous souls that fought bravely for perfection would attain it sooner than the less enterprising. Those who lent themselves to evil would retrograde—would, like Sisyphus, be perpetually at work at the same step-in-advance. And those who failed to believe in the Eternal might revolve in fleshly forms even while the globe itself continued in the Universe in its present form. Hugh read and re-read. Certain ideas he had vaguely felt floating among his troubled thoughts of late were assuming definite shape. Throughout that hardest, most perplexed reverie of his life he remembered certain facts. Lilia’s unbelief during life: her rebellion against the law of Death at the last. The strange knowledge the Princess Mercedes had had from her earliest years of the awful scene in his life—Mercedes, who was born nine months after Lilia’s death. “If I tell Helven this,” he said to himself, with a ghastly laugh at his own thoughts, “he will say that Mercedes is Lilia re-embodied. Did ever a romantic dreamer on subjects beyond our mortal powers of comprehension find such a case in point to bear out his wild imaginings?” Lilia’s death—Mercedes’ birth—Lilia’s wild love for him—Mercedes’ feeling that his presence was necessary to her wellbeing. “Bah! I am trying to justify my passion for that girl—that is what I am doing!” he cried to himself in an excess of self-anger. “I want to justify my unfaithfulness to Lilia, whom, if _this_ is love, I never loved! God! I would die a thousand times for this girl—she has me, soul, body, _all_!” No more would he deceive himself. He knew now—he knew that he was in the grasp of the one great passion of his whole life. What should he do? Fly? To-morrow, if he chose, he could cancel all engagements, cast off all responsibilities, leave all arrangements to his lawyer, and start for—anywhere—without detriment to his one duty in life—Ralph. His father was dead, his sisters absorbed in their husbands and families. He had no ties. Would it not be best to turn his back upon his great temptation? He resisted the thought. The fact was, he shrank from the daily and hourly struggle against the longing for Mercedes’ presence which he felt would arise when he had cut himself adrift. “I am exaggerating the situation,” he told himself, summoning his ordinary common sense to his aid. “It throws one off one’s mental balance to be confronted by such a coincidence as my dreaming of that fantastic stuff years before the man wrote it.” Meanwhile he felt as if he would like to see Helven again. The feeling was so strong next morning that after he had finished his hospital work he drove to the publishers of the book his thoughts had so curiously anticipated, to obtain its author’s address.