"But I don’t care about the past," I said, "it is the future. According to you, in my next existence I shall unite with some other spirit and lose half my own individuality." "I do not think you will," he replied laughing, "because you do not love as yet, and love only is the attraction which draws kindred spirits together. When they desire to unite, they will. Till then they must remain incomplete. But those who are thus joined together are conscious not of loss, but of the most exquisite gain; and this union is foreshadowed by the joining together in marriage of man and woman here." "But it cannot always be the spirits of husband and wife who are thus united." Sydney laughed. "Hardly," he said. "Marriage is but a material convenience, and there are not many who have reached that state when the unity of souls becomes desirable; but nevertheless there are those living whose marriage is a foretaste of a union which shall be made perfect through death. But often the complement of a spirit is not on this earth, though they have met in some previous existence." "Do you know," I asked, "to whose spirit yours will be united?" "I do," he answered; and the accent on the words drew my attention to his face: there I read such depth of love and hope as I have never seen light up the features of man or woman. "It was," he said, "while in the spirit-world that I learnt much of what I have now told you. But I learnt more than this, for I was able to look into the past, and to see the why and wherefore of many things that had previously puzzled me here. It was something that I had thus discovered which induced me to buy the land and build this present house. Beyond that panel, through which we are going, lies one of the secrets of my past. But I must explain one more thing to you before we go. "The higher the form of spirit life, the longer it usually takes for souls to unite. In the lower orders these changes may occur every few minutes; in the higher, centuries may intervene." Sydney now got up, and motioning me to follow, went to a sliding panel, touched a spring, and we passed together into a narrow passage. After descending some winding steps, which must have brought us to about twenty-five feet below the level of the house, we passed through another door into a large covered courtyard which, except for its domed roof and polygonal shape, reminded me of one of the Pompeian houses.