She was almost obtrusively lady-like, tall and pale, and mild and bland, in long trailing draperies of blue. She had sweet anæmic features, and a watery eye that suffused with tears on the slightest occasion. Her hair was thin and sandy, coiled into a knob on the top of her narrow head; her mouth was large, lax, emotional; her glances soulful and celestial. She wore a quantity of mystical-looking chains and necklaces that gleamed and jingled as she languished from place to place with a certain priestly elegance. She fell to Kingston’s lot at dinner, and during the first part of the meal he felt himself truly unfortunate. At last, however, a chance word caught his attention and held it. ‘Ah, my dear Mr. Merrington,’ he heard her saying to her other neighbour in high dulcet tones--‘dear, dear Mr. Merrington, believe me, I have often had the sweetest converse with my dear dead.’ She sighed, as if in rapture, while Mr. Merrington helped himself to a cutlet in aspic. ‘They return to those that love them, Mr. Merrington,’ she went on, as soon as the cutlet had been safely landed. ‘I never feel that my dear ones have been lost. They are always near one--it only needs a suitable medium to produce them. Oh, of course, I am not talking of silly common séances. _Those_ spirits are people one would not wish to have anything to do with; but, ah! the sweet and holy talks I have had with my own beloved ones in suitable surroundings.’ At this point, seeing Mr. Merrington more favourably inclined towards the cutlet than the conversation, Kingston thought he might be allowed to take part in the talk. ‘One always feels,’ he said, ‘that from all accounts the spirits that return must be those of exceedingly weak-minded people. The messages they make so much ado about conveying are invariably such rubbish.’ Mrs. Mercer-Laporte turned the watery gleam of her smile upon him. ‘What is matter?’ she asked hierophantically. ‘Ah, Mr. Darnley, what does matter matter? Believe me, you have been unfortunate in the spirits you have met. In the innumerable vibrations of the Universe there are rays innumerable that permeate the Whole with their blessed dew, and consume in their pure radiance all the coarser manifestations of matter. You speak without that inward higher knowledge which makes us one with the Infinite, in those far Universes where the Veil of matter exists no longer, and the blessed dead are free and untrammelled by any more cares of this vulgar flesh!’ Mrs. Mercer-Laporte stopped to take breath, and in an abstraction allowed herself to be given an artichoke. Then, while she was unconsciously devouring it, Kingston took advantage of the pause in her oration to recall her to the question that interested him. ‘Then,’ he said, ‘soberly and without mistake, are you really sure that we can ever converse with our own friends in other states of existence?’