“It was all--er--unexpected and sudden like that?” came the question from a hundred others that crowded together in me. “To find a lost friend of years only--in such a way--the shock, I mean, to you----!” I simply could not find my words. He told it all so calmly, naturally. “You were wholly unprepared, weren’t you? Nothing had led you to expect?” I ended with a dash. “Not wholly unprepared,” was his rejoinder; “nor was the meeting altogether unexpected--on my side, that is. Intimations, as I told you at Motfield Close twenty years ago--when she was born--had come to me. No soul draws breath for the first time, without a quiver of response running through all that lives. Souls intimately connected with each other may feel the summons. There are ways----! I knew that she was once more in the world, that, like ourselves, her soul had reincarnated; and ever since I have been searching----” “Searching----!” “There are clues that offer themselves--that come, perhaps in sleep, perhaps by direct experiment, and, regardless of space, give hints----” “Psychometry?” I asked, remembering a word just coined. He shrugged his shoulders. “All objects radiate,” he said, “no matter how old they are. Their radiation never ceases till they are disintegrated; and if you are sensitive you can receive their messages. If you have certain powers, due to relation and affinity, you may interpret them. There is an instantaneous linking-up--in picture-form--impossible to mistake.” “You knew, then, she was somewhere on the earth--waiting for you?” I repeated, wondering what was coming next. That night in the Edinburgh lodgings, when he had been “searching,” came back to me. “For _us_,” he corrected me. “It was something from a Private Collection that gave me the clue by which I finally traced her--something from the older sands.” “The sands! Egyptian?” Julius nodded. “Egypt, for all of us, was a comparatively recent section--nearer to To-day, I mean. Many a time has each of us been back there--Thebes, Memphis, even as lately ago as Alexandria at its zenith, learning, developing, reaping what ages before we sowed--for in Egypt the knowledge that was _our_ knowledge survived longer than anywhere else. Yet never, unfortunately, returning together, and thus never finding the opportunity to achieve the great purpose of our meeting.” “But the clue?” I asked breathlessly. He smiled again at the eagerness that again betrayed me. “This old world,” he resumed quietly, “is strewn, of course, with the remnants of what once has been our bodies--‘suits of clothes’ we have inhabited, used, and cast aside. Here and there, from one chance or another, some of these may have been actually preserved. The Egyptians, for instance, went to considerable trouble to ensure that they should survive as long as possible, thus assisting memory later.” “Embalming, you mean?”