"Adventures!" they all exclaimed, "What adventures? Why, you have been lying down in your bed upstairs for months past watched by us in turn day and night without a moment's cessation, and now you talk of adventures. It's we who have had the adventures, not you. Strange things have happened since that memorable evening when you went off in the trance-sleep. Are you aware, professor, that Pierre attempted to murder you by injecting a subtle poison into your arm?" "Enough of that," said Delapine, "I know it all. Didn't you get my letter, Renée, in which I pointed it all out to you, and entreated you not to allow me to be touched or buried?" "Rather! Why, Henri, Dr. Riche brought it to me, and it was that letter which saved your life by convincing Riche and Villebois that you were not dead, and so preventing the autopsy. Oh! how thankful I was when I read it. It gave me new life--in fact I am sure if I had not received some such encouragement I should have died of grief." "Thank God that you saw the letter in time," replied Delapine, "I had a strange premonition that all this was going to happen, and so I prepared for it by giving you the sealed envelope." "Let us not talk about it now, Henri, you are under my orders and I cannot allow my patient to get excited." "Well, wait a few days until I get stronger, and then I will dictate to you my experiences, and you shall write them down, and we will publish a book about them. I think they will make good reading. You must know, Renée, that the moment I went into the deep sleep or trance, my soul (or Ego) left the body and went far away, and only returned to it about the 19th January." "Why that was when dear mother came to see me." "Precisely," Delapine nodded. "She was watching over you all the time, but she was unable to reveal herself in a visible tangible form, unless there was a suitable medium who was en rapport with her. Fortunately I was such a medium, and the moment I returned to my body she seized the opportunity which she had been long waiting for to reveal herself to you in bodily form by building herself out of the particles of my body." "How strange!" they all exclaimed. "Yes," said the professor, "I have studied these things deeply. I have discovered that all spiritualistic phenomena are governed by laws which are just as fixed and unalterable as are the laws which govern all the phenomena of this visible world. We have only to learn and understand how spiritual phenomena are produced and controlled by these laws, to extend our conquest over the invisible world of science in the same way that we have extended our knowledge over the visible world of science during the last three hundred years. Spiritual science is only in the same stage of knowledge and advancement in which electricity was at the time of Volta, or steam at the time of Watt." "Oh, do tell us about it," they all said.