"That I cannot tell you, sir," he said. "I'm better at conviction than at explanation, I'm afraid. I only know--not with my reason, but with my heart--that spirit is, and has been, and must be everlastingly." "And its mode of expression, its mode of self-revelation?" the other inquired drily. Laurence straightened himself up, laughing a little. "One way, the old why--childish, perhaps, yet really rather charming. In and by love, sir--only so, by love." Tremulously Mr. Rivers drew the rich, sable cape closer about him, though the heat of the room was intense. "I become very abject," he said at last. "I procrastinate and risk letting slip the opportunity still permitted me. For in my abjection, I own I clutch at straws, miserably anxious for support. I am ashamed that any other human being should witness the mental prostration to which physical illness has reduced me. But time presses, and compels me to delay no longer in confessing my object in calling you to me to-night. Tell me, Laurence, have you investigated those abnormal phenomena of which we spoke, and have your investigations yielded any result?" The question took the listener somewhat by surprise, and he hesitated before replying. The whole matter had become of such vital importance to him, personal, intimate, among the dearest and most reverently-held secrets of his heart. So he shrank, as before an act of profanation, from submitting the history of his fairy-lady and of his strange relation to her to the criticism of this cold-blooded, sceptical intelligence. Yet he was bound by his promise to report, if called on to do so--bound, too, in mere humanity towards one lying at the point of death, and to whom that history might, conceivably, bring solace and enlightenment. "Yes, I have investigated the phenomena in part," he answered. "And the result?" "Briefly, I think, that which I ventured to state to you just now--that love is the language of the spirit, the only medium through which spirit can declare itself and be apprehended, the one element of our poor human constitution which promises to continue and to preserve to us a measure of coherence and individuality even after death." The young man leaned forward again, and laid his hand on the warm haunches of the ebony sphinx with a movement of slight defiance. "Listen," he said, "please, sir, and I'll do my best to tell you exactly what has happened since we spoke of this subject last." He steadied himself to his task, trying to keep his narrative circumstantial and restrained, to offer nothing more than a bald statement of fact. But the charm of it, once he had started, was a little too much for him. His speech grew lyrical against his will. And Mr. Rivers listened, his eyes closed, his brow drawn into hard lines by the effort of attention. Once he held up his hand. "Did you question this appearance?" he asked.