The least touch destroys a delicate balance, and Mrs. Mercer-Laporte’s rather watery personality it was that had the power, after so many years of hesitation, to decide Kingston upon taking his long-delayed plunge into spiritualistic circles. Little as he might think of Mrs. Mercer-Laporte’s own rhapsodies, they forced upon his mind the reflection that many good and presumably prudent people derive much comfort and sustenance from occult manifestations. With all allowances made for credulity, hysteria, and affectation there yet, it seemed to him suddenly, must remain an irreducible minimum of fact about the ghostly communications which make the consolation of so many sad, lonely lives. The laws that govern life and death are, when all is said and done, so dimly, so doubtfully known and guessed, that bold must be he who dares, on the supposition of impossibility, to deny continued existence and continued volition to the blessed dead. Who was to take it upon himself to say confidently that they cannot return, for reasons that we know not, under natural laws of which we have no more suspicion than had the eighteenth century of those that give us electricity? Seeing the incalculable nature of the soul, the impalpable, mysterious substance of its being, the probabilities that physical death only give it freedom were, on the whole, very great and worthy of respect. Why obstinately mock, for the sake of a few frauds and charlatans, at a deep belief, as old as humanity, which has been held, and is held to this day, by many of the wisest and holiest among men? What claim to wisdom has the stiff-necked attitude of mere negation, based on nothing but ignorant prejudice and the sceptic’s baseless notion of what may or may not be possible to a thing of whose being, and the laws that control it, he knows no more than any enthusiastic believer in apparitions? Why not, then, take the braver, more honest course of inquiring for one’s self into the circumstances of the spirit-world? In any case the inquiry could do no harm; either way, one would gain certainty, instead of the present dreary and unprofitable doubt. And if Isabel’s purified soul were, after all, by some merciful freak of creation, still roaming the world in her lover’s neighbourhood, how utterly, childishly silly not to ascertain the fact and profit by it, in place of continuing deaf to that dear desired voice, out of puerile prejudice and a preconceived notion that such things could not be. Mrs. Mercer-Laporte’s enthusiasm had the effect of forcing all these arguments on Kingston with new and irresistible force. He could hold out no longer; his loneliness could afford to neglect no chances of relief; he would try what consolation the Other World had to offer.