“Your aspirations, hopes and fears, all that has ever burned vitally at your centre, every spiritual passion that uplifted or enticed, each deep endeavour that seeded your present tendencies and talents--everything, in fact, strong enough to have touched your Soul--sends up its whirling picture of beauty or dismay at the appointed time. The disentangling may be difficult, but all are there, for you yourself are their actual, living Record. Feeling, not thinking, best unravels them--the primitive vision as of children--the awareness of kinship with everything about you. The sense of separateness and isolation vanishes, and the soul recovers the consciousness of sharing all the universe. There is no loneliness; there is no more fear.” * * * * * Ah, how we talked that night of tempest through! What thoughts and dreams and possibilities Julius sent thundering against my mind as with the power of the loosed wind and rain outside. The scale of life became immense, each tiniest detail of act and thought important with the sacredness of some cosmic ceremonial that it symbolised. Yet to his words alone this power was not due, but rather to some force of driving certitude in himself that brought into me too a similar conviction. The memory of it hardened in the sands of my imagination, as it were, so that the result has remained, although the language by which he made it seem so reasonable has gone. I smoked my pipe; and, as the smoke curled upwards, I watched his face of pallid marble and the mop of ebony hair that set off so well the brilliance of the eyes. He looked, I thought to myself, like no human being I had ever seen before. “And sometimes,” I remember hearing, “the memories from a later section may suddenly swarm across an earlier one--confusing the sight, perhaps, just when it is getting clear. A few hours ago, for instance, my search was interrupted by an inrush of two more recent layers--Eastern ones--which came to obliterate with their vividness the older, dimmer ones I sought.” I mentioned what the frightened woman imagined she had seen. “She caught a reflected fragment too,” he said. “So strong a picture was bound to spread.” “Then was Mrs. Garnier with us too before?” I asked, as we burst out laughing. “Not in that sense, no. It was the glamour that touched her only--second-sight, as she might call it. She is sensitive to impressions, nothing more.”