The address was a street in Bloomsbury. With the new instinct to hide his doings dominating him, Dr. Paull would not drive there in his own carriage. He telegraphed to Helven asking him for an audience that evening. The reply arrived during the afternoon: “_With pleasure—at eight.—Helven._” So, with an excuse for his absence to Ralph, at twenty minutes to eight Hugh strolled out of the house, and hailing a hansom in Oxford street, drove to Blank street, Bloomsbury. It was a large, old, neglected house, smelling of damp and stale tobacco smoke. A maid ushered Dr. Paull up the blackened staircase into the large drawing-rooms, once, in their early days, the reception-rooms of fashionable dames, and doubtless gorgeous with tapestries and crystal chandeliers; now dismal with dirt and dingy books, papers, and dusty odds and ends of crazy furniture. There was one bright spot in the room—a large lamp on the centre table, where Mr. Helven was bending over his papers, a long pipe in his mouth. “Ah!” he said, in a pleased tone, looking up from his work over his spectacles and laying aside his pipe, “I am glad to see you, Dr. Paull. A chair for Dr. Paull, Margaret, if you please. Allow me, I will help you;” and as courteously as if the dirtily-dressed servant girl had been a refined lady, the old man assisted her to remove some twenty or so large volumes from a chair, and bowing her out of the room, invited Hugh to be seated. “This is unexpected,” he said, beaming at his guest. “I remember meeting you about ten years ago. You were then a confirmed materialist, doctor.” “Scarcely that,” said Hugh. “I have never altogether given up the simple tenets I learned in my mother’s lap.” Now that he was here, burning to tell his story and to see the effect it would produce on the Pythagorean, a certain awkwardness made him preface his disclosures by ordinary talk. For some minutes the two scientists spoke of the recent discoveries in physiology and other of Nature’s storehouses, and of the careers or deaths of well-known scholars who had been present at the conversazione where they had met. Then old Helven grew absent in manner, and suddenly interrupted Hugh in the middle of a sentence. “Dr. Paull, you have something to tell me,” he said. “What is it?” Their eyes met, they smiled. “I have a strange story to tell you,” said Hugh. “But first you must understand that, without my express permission, it must go no further than your memory. You will remember, no fear of that!” Then he told him of his last night’s perusal of his work _On Certain Ancient Doctrines_, and of his strange dream of the part “On the Age of Souls,” twenty years ago, at the Pinewood. Helven was amazed.