Virdow was not a scientist in the strict sense of the term. He had been a fairly good musician in youth and had advanced somewhat in art. He was one of those modern scientists, who are not walled in by past conclusions, but who, like Morse, leap forward from a vantage point and build back to connect with old results. Early in life he had studied the laws of vibration, until it seemed revealed to him that all forms, all fancies, were born of it. Gradually as his beautiful demonstrations were made and all art co-ordinated upon this law, he saw in dreams a fulfillment of his hopes that in his age, in his life, might bloom the fairest flower of science, a mind memory opened to mortal consciousness. Dreaming further along the lines of Wagner, it had come to him that the key to this hidden, dumb and sleeping record of the mind was vibration; that the strains of music which summon beautiful dreams to the minds of men were magic wands lifting the vision of this past; not its immediate past, but the past of ages; for in the brain of the subtle German was firmly fixed the belief that the minds of men were in their last analysis one and indivisible, and older than the molecules of physical creation. He held triumphantly that "then shall you see clearly," was but one way of saying "then shall you remember." To this man the mind picture which Gerald had drawn, the church, with its tragic figures, came as a reward of generations of labor. He had followed many a false trail and failed in hospital and asylum. In Gerald he hoped for a sound, active brain, combined with the faculty of expression in many languages and the finer power of art; an organism sufficiently delicate to carry into that viewless vinculum between body and soul, vibrations, rhymes and co-ordinations delicate enough to touch a new consciousness and return its reply through organized form. He had found these conditions perfect, and he felt that if failure was the result, while still firmly fixed in his belief, never again would opportunity of equal merit present itself. If in Gerald his theory failed of demonstration, the mind's past would be, in his lifetime, locked to his mortal consciousness. In brief he had formed the conditions so long sought and upon these his life's hope was staked. Much of this he stated as they sat in the wing-room. Gerald lay upon the divan when he began talking, lost in abstraction, but as the theory of the German was gradually unfolded Edward saw him fix his bright eye upon the speaker, saw him becoming restless and excited. When the explanation ended he was walking the floor.