He, the infidel, the student of Toland and Tindale, the friend and associate of Voltaire, had been at once subjugated by his first experience of a world beyond the world of sense. He did not accept that shadowy visitant as an evidence of revealed religion; but it was to him at least something more than a projection of his own imagination. It was to him an assurance of a love beyond the grave, of a spiritual link between those who have loved each other on earth, a sympathy which corruption cannot destroy or worms devour. Out of darkness and dust his mother's voice had called to him, "Prepare for death." She who had taught him the Gospel at her knees now called upon him, who had lived as an infidel, to die as a Christian. Not for an instant did he doubt that warning. It was not the first; but all previous warnings had been purely physical. That sudden agony which had seized him on two or three occasions at long intervals within the last three or four years had warned him of organic disease. His heart had been tortured by that acute anguish which tells of the hardening of the valves; and though the fit had passed quickly, cured by a medicine which Vincenti had prepared for him, it had left him weakened and depressed. He had never cared to question Vincenti as to the cause of that pain, or to consult any better qualified adviser; but he knew that the symptom must point to some organic evil, something of which the end might be death. And now, having deliberately renounced that which he deemed his final chance of happiness, he sat alone in that spacious library where he had seen the vision, and brooded over the past, the fatal irrevocable past, with all its storm and fury and its small sum of happiness, and wondered, with a half-apathetic wonder, what his life would have been like if he had been a good Christian.