“I cannot doubt your impressions,” he said, after hearing details. “But, visionary though people think me, I confess to but small belief in dreams. I can believe that there may appear to be a strong similarity in a vivid dream to facts that afterwards ensue. But you, in your own book _On the Physiology of Sleep_, refute the idea of impressions we receive in dreams and our waking memory of those impressions coinciding. The fact is, that when you thought you dreamt of those chapters I headed ‘On the Age of Souls,’ I had not even planned out their synopsis.” “But you knew the doctrines then, Mr. Helven,” said Hugh. “The doctrines are as old as the hills, Dr. Paull,” said Helven. “But is your story a story of dreams?” “I wish it were!” said Hugh. “No, what I have to tell you is simple fact. I trust you; so I will not disguise identities. The tale is of my own life.” He briefly recounted his acquaintance with Sir Roderick, his affection for Lilia, and their marriage, not omitting his dream of a strange lady who spoke strange words to him with a foreign accent: the dream which he believed now to have been a prevision of Mercedes. “My wife loved me unreasonably,” he said. “At times I feared the feeling might become a monomania. Poor child! when I had to tell her that she must resign herself to die, there was a terrible scene.” He recounted the awful hour of his life, when Lilia exacted a promise that as soon as she was dead he would commit self-murder, and how he was saved by the accident to the babe, and Mrs. Mervyn’s consequent interruption with the child in her arms. “I was sitting at the table in the library when this friend, with my child in her arms, suddenly appeared,” he said. “Pistols were on the table before me. I was resting my arms on the table and my head was bent down upon them. I am telling you these details because they bear upon the extraordinary part of my story. “Well, I was saved. Then followed nineteen years of hard work and solitude. I have shunned society; I went weekly to the Pinewood, to my wife’s grave. I did all I could to prevent my poor child from feeling her loss; and in this sort of life I hoped to atone to my wife’s spirit for breaking the terrible promise she forced from me on her death-bed. I had many hours of wretchedness when I remembered her frame of mind when she passed into the Infinite. Often and often I reproached myself that I had not taken her atheism more seriously, that I had not made her realisation of Eternity my constant work. Since her death I have tried constantly, in all possible ways, to communicate with her soul, wherever it may be. But pray, struggle, do what I might, I failed.” “You, with your knowledge, believed it possible for an embodied spirit to communicate with the immaterial?” asked Helven, leaning back in his chair, surprised.