‘The fire of passion,’ replied the pale tired voice, ‘is a thing old as all life. Because of some strong passion, born many ages since, you now suffer the pangs of loss and separation. It is no new thing, this pain of yours. It rests with you now, my son, whether you will carry it on with you along the road, as you brought it with you into this stage of your journey.’ Astonishment, intense and paralytic, possessed the younger man as these evidences of insight into his own most secret feelings dropped so prosaically, so unemotionally from the lips of this worn old wanderer. But even astonishment yielded to the keen wonder aroused by the possibility that the words revealed. He demanded further revelations from his uncle. ‘Over all the fields of existence the opened eye can wander,’ replied the other. ‘I can see whence you have come, and in what dark places you are now wandering. Because of the help that I hoped I could give you, I have come here to-night. You are suffering the penalty of bygone folly, you are chained in the bond of a bad Karma. You have loved something, and you think now you have lost it. Worst of all, you long to recover it, you long to rivet round you again the fetters of desire and sorrow. Many and many are they that come to me, crying for the sound or the touch of some beloved dead. Women calling across the abysses to their dead children, their lovers, their husbands; men clamouring for reunion with the women they have loved. This life of yours, too, here in the West, is filled with the cry of those who seek what they have lost. ‘Give us back our dead,’ they say; ‘let us touch them, hear them, speak to them again.’ In hopes of this evil miracle your churches are crowded, your charlatans grow rich, your Heaven finds believers. A place to meet the dead again! Weak and foolish, weak and foolish, not to know that love is sorrow, and that the dead we loved stand for the heaviest grief of our lives.’ ‘But then,’ answered Kingston, ‘what is love? Why do we feel it, if it is such a weak and foolish passion?’ ‘What is love? It is the ghost of your own dead lives recalled to life again. What are we but the agglomeration of innumerable previous personalities? All our feelings are dim echoes of a hundred million fragmentary feelings that have lived before in the innumerable dead, who are dust of the ages. What is it that gives us the keen joy that we take in some piece of music, in some corner of landscape? It is the harmony of countless memories that are awakened in us out of all our dead existences by the sound we hear, or the sight we see. Otherwise, it could mean nothing to us, if this life were our first, if we had no previous existence to build on. All life is memory made incarnate. All love is a recognition.’ ‘Then you are talking of reincarnation,’ answered Kingston; ‘what has love to do with that?’