Now, Karl had promised me that, in the event of any further trances taking place, he would write to me without delay, giving details and carefully noting exact times. It came as no surprise when I opened a telegram from him: “Constantine sails by to-morrow’s Cunarder. Letter follows.” I showed it to Maggie. “You two are beginning to indulge in simultaneous magnetization,” I said. “You may depend upon it, Karl had a look round New York about half-past nine last night, Greenwich time. He brought you with him. If you were not so timid you would soon be able to see as well as hear.” “You forget that I can see _him_,” she said, and her voice was so low that I glanced at her and was surprised to find her cheeks suffused with color. “Did you see him last night?” I demanded. “No, but I was conscious of his presence.” “Conscious! How?” “I cannot tell,” she answered simply. “I only know that it is so.” “Yet you have astonished me frequently by your direct way of expressing your meaning. There are so many forms of consciousness.” “Some of them are new to me. When Karl magnetized your hands did you know what was happening?” “I felt a numbing cold from the wrists to the finger-tips.” “That is akin to my sensation, too, but it is general, as I have told you already.” I laughed. Being an old fogy, I had omitted a most important factor in the affairs of these young people. If, as I suspected, Maggie was as badly smitten as Karl with that curable disease of the heart called love, it was fairly certain that these two were thinking of each other at every spare moment of the day, not to mention their dreams. Karl’s letter, explicit enough in all details, bore out Maggie’s statement. Constantine was behaving like an incipient homicidal maniac. He had purchased a deadly looking dagger, of Sicilian manufacture; hence, it was a reasonable assumption that the blade would be efficient if properly used. “I purpose meeting the scoundrel and kicking him into his senses,” wrote Karl, coolly; but his father and I, assured that Constantine had, indeed, quitted the States, considered the matter far too serious to be left to such a haphazard method of treatment. Grier _père_, what between anxiety on his son’s account and annoyance that the dawn of a splendid career should be clouded by this rejuvenescence of a faculty which he fondly believed was long since dead as a doornail, was not the best of counselors at this crisis. In view of the tragedy which did actually take place, I have often wondered, in those quiet hours when a man reviews the past without prejudice, whether any better course was open to us than that which we adopted.