“Young brother,” said Madame Riennes, “we deal with the things not of the body, but of the soul. The body, what is it? In a few years it will be dust and ashes, but the soul—it is eternal—and all those stars you study are its inheritance, and you and I, if we cultivate our spiritual parts, shall rule in them.” Then she would roll her big eyes and become in a way magnificent, so that Godfrey forgot her ugliness and the repulsion with which she inspired him. In the end his outlook on life and the world became different, and this not so much because of what he learned from his esoteric teachers, as through some change in his internal self. He grew to appreciate the vastness of things and the infinite possibilities of existence. Indeed, his spiritual education was a fitting pendant to his physical study of the heavens, peopled with unnumbered worlds, each of them the home, doubtless, of an infinite variety of life, and each of them keeping its awful secrets locked in its floating orb. He trembled in presence of the stupendous Whole, of which thus by degrees he became aware, and though it frightened him, thought with pity of the busy millions of mankind to whom such mysteries are nothing at all; who are lost in their business or idleness, in their eating, drinking, sleeping, love-making, and general satisfaction of the instincts which they possess in common with every other animal. The yearning for wisdom, the desire to know, entered his young heart and possessed it, as once these did that of Solomon, to such a degree indeed, that standing on the threshold of his days, he would have paid them all away, and with them his share in this warm and breathing world, could he have been assured that in exchange he would receive the key of the treasure-house of the Infinite. Such an attitude was neither healthy nor natural to a normal, vigorous lad just entering upon manhood, and, as will be seen, it did not endure. Like everything else, it had its causes. His astronomical studies were one of these, but a deeper reason was to be found in those Sunday séances at the Villa Ogilvy. For a long while Godfrey did not know what happened to him on these occasions. The party sat round the little table, talking of wonderful things; Madame Riennes looked at him and sometimes took his hand, which he did not like, and then he remembered no more until he woke up, feeling tired, and yet in a way exhilarated, for with the mysteries of hypnotic sleep he was not yet acquainted. Nor did it occur to him that he was being used as a medium by certain of the most advanced spiritualists in the world.