The bereaved! The whole stupendous delusion seemed to rest upon the overmastering desire of the bereaved for their beloved. The great and good men and women among the believers (he was willing to admit there were such) came to investigation weakened by sorrow, made illogical by loss. They put their sane judgment, their strength, their calm patience aside and grasped eagerly at the lying comfort extended to them. They were not merely deceived, they developed fraud by their blindness, by their hunger for consolation, and by their crass credulity. He was still young enough to have inexorable theories--to be of single-hearted loyalty to his creed. To him as a monist, the soul (as an entity apart from the body) did not exist. Consciousness was a physical disturbance of the higher nerve centres, and thought a secretion of the brain. He acknowledged no line of demarcation between the crystal and the monera--and no chasm (of course) between man and the animals. The universe was a unit--and all its forms and forces differentiations of one substance and that substance too mysterious to be analyzed or named. In such a philosophy as this there could be no room for any hypothesis which even so much as squinted towards dualism, or that permitted a conception so childish as the persistence of the individuality after death. However, he did not carry his implacable principles into the homes of his friends, and seldom permitted them to interfere with his enjoyment of wines or good dinners, the theatre or the drawing-room. This fact, from a cynical point of view, proved his faith to have been as truly of his laboratory as that of a bishop, with Spencer and Darwin and Koch and Haeckel as the founders of its articles. He went home that night with the words of both Weissmann and Britt intermingling in his mind, strongly tempted to tell Viola's story to his sister, and so enlist her sympathy for the poor girl. But it happened that an engagement to dine filled Kate's mind, and he had no time to open the subject till they were on the way, and by that time he had concluded not to involve her in his perplexity. By a curious coincidence one of the guests at the dinner brought a hush of expectancy over the entire company by relating a series of experiences he had been privileged to share with a "psychic" some years before. He told of his mystification with a laugh in his eyes and with racy vigor of tongue, but Serviss, newly alive to the topic, could not but marvel at the intensity of interest manifested by every soul present. "Disguise it as we may," said the narrator, "this question of the life beyond the grave is chief of all our problems. It is the sovereign mystery, after all." At this the hostess spoke: "I wish _we_ could see some of these things. You make us shudder deliciously. Can't you sometime bring this remarkable young woman--they're always women, aren't they?"