I looked surprised, and asked, "Of what--of whom would you hear?" "Doctor," she said, fixing upon me those deep grey orbs, with a glance that seemed to read my inmost soul, "do not deceive me; you _know_ that you have been with _him_." "Who can she mean?" I mentally asked. "Can she mean Charles?" "Yes," she answered to my thought, "with _him_--with _Charles_. Hide nothing from me, doctor. I see you look surprised that I should know where you come from; but my senses are too keen, too abnormally acute, not to perceive that you carry about you _the particles of his being_ as unmistakably as if you had been amongst roses or honeysuckles. Can I be deceived when you come to me directly from the chamber of the only man I ever loved in my life, with the atoms of his nature clinging to you? Think you that I know aught of your doings? That I have been informed as to where _he_ lives? I tell you, No; I know nothing but what my senses tell me. I feel you have been with him, and whatever you might tell me to the contrary would not make me believe otherwise." "Well," I said smiling, "I don't deny that I _have_ just come from a patient in London, whose name is Charles; but London is large, and there are many Charleses." "I do not care _where_ your patient is--whether at London or the North Pole, I shall probably never come across him; in fact, I don't see that it would aid matters much if I were to. I have never seen him--that is to say, with these eyes--and probably never may," she said, with a deep sigh. "Do I understand you to say that you have never seen this young man you talk about, and yet you take so much interest in him?" "Never with the eyes of the body," she replied. "How, then?" I asked. "With the eyes of the spirit." "That is to say," I resumed, "that this young man named Charles is but a creature of the imagination--that he has no real existence." "Oh, pardon me," she replied; "decidedly he has an existence--a double one. A bodily one, of which I know nothing; and a spiritual one, of which I know more." "How?" I asked. "You have never seen him in the flesh, but are yet acquainted with his spirit. Does the spirit leave his body and appear to you?" "Precisely so." "Oh! but these are hallucinations, my dear young lady," I said, "that patients in your state of health are frequently subject to." "No, doctor; say not so," she answered. "It is now more than a year since, that in my dream, as I was walking alone in a beautiful garden, I met a young man, also quite alone and reading. He was of extraordinary personal beauty. He looked at me a moment and passed by. The very next evening I had the same dream--there he was again. The dream was so very vivid, that I could not believe it to be one of those ordinary dreams so common to persons suffering from indigestion. There was such a reality about the whole--the garden, the terraces, the old house--altogether had too much truth about it to have been a dream."