And that memory being in her mind when the treasure came into her keeping, it may be guessed with what joyous confirmation of hope she heard presently that the once-crowned head had itself become a sudden convert to Second Adventism. No sooner did the news reach her than she felt that he was already hers; and having first sped a message, a week later she was upon the high seas, on her way to meet him, and the box with its seven seals, bore her company. At the Customs she expensively saved its sacred contents from profane scrutiny by declaring it to be a special brand of tea hermetically sealed from sea-air. And as nothing of that weight could have cost her more, officials with uncrowned heads took her word for it, and passed into the country a prophecy destined to make its mark in history, besides giving a neat finish to the career of Mr. Trimblerigg. What happened next must be briefly told; for I do not quite know all the circumstances that lay behind it. With the soul of Isabel Sparling I have had so little acquaintance that I do not make myself responsible for it; only as she came within range of Mr. Trimblerigg, and affected his career, did she interest me. For which reason I must leave unsolved the problem of the seven seals and what they contained at different dates, more especially whether they contained different things before and after the day when she actually took charge of them. I will only say this, that Isabel Sparling was by the look of her an astute, a daring, and a resolute character; nor do I think that for good and great ends she would stick at trifles or have more scruple than Mr. Trimblerigg himself. Also I have reason to believe that she knew her man; and it may well be that in the gyrations of her emotional career, on which Mr. Trimblerigg’s own orbit had had its gravitating effect, she may have assimilated the doctrine of Relative Truth more than one knows. And so whether it was genuine prophecy, coincidence, or only Relative Truth which brought the thing to pass, I leave each reader to decide according to his own taste or credulity. The initial fact is that when Isabel Sparling, obliterating a disputatious past, again met Mr. Trimblerigg, in order to make him the instrument of her vision for the Millennium that was to be, she did not find his head visibly crowned. Nor had she expected it; yet she was puzzled that it was not so. Such self-abnegation, to the foregoing of a gift so uplifting and spiritual, though admirable as a mere act of humility was not to be encouraged when a world in flux was waiting to be saved not so much by knowledge in things spiritual as by novelty, and when, in consequence, anything in the way of signs and wonders might be of so much help.