"Let me see them--please!" she pleaded, earnestly. "They will comfort me, too, for I am under conviction." He took from his pocket a package of small photographs. "Here," he said, "are the three flashlights of my grandfather, Nelson Blodgett." The young woman almost snatched them in her eager haste. "Oh, wonderful! What a document! The medium plainly in her cage--and this figure on the same plate." "It is the most convincing picture in existence," he said, sadly, "but it cost me my mother." She fixed a dreamy gaze upon him. "If this is a spirit--then your mother can return to you. Has she done so?" He moved uneasily. "I have not asked her to do that. I don't care to be controlled or guided by spirits, not even by her spirit." "Why?" His voice was firm and assured as he replied: "Because I want to live and work out my career like other men. I don't want to see or hear any more of the 'astral plane'--" He checked himself. "It isn't natural for a man like me to be mixed up with all this spirit business, and I'm tired of it." "I see what you mean. You want to work and woo and marry like other men. You're right; of course you're right. What have we who are young and vigorous to do with the dead, anyway? Unless all human life is a mistake, a foolish thing, it's our business to live it humanly." She held out her hand for the other pictures. "Let me see them all, please!" He handed them to her. "There were three cameras," he explained, "hence these duplicates. These faces are likenesses of Mr. Bartol's wife and two children--and these plates, remember, were not exposed--they are of Altair, one of the guides." She studied the shadowy forms with keen gaze. "One of the strange things about this 'spirit photograph' business is the resemblance they all bear to pictures--I mean, they all look as if they were photographs of framed portraits or drawings." Again he betrayed restlessness. "Mr. Stinchfield noticed that." "What is his explanation?" "He does not think they come from spirits at all." She urged him to unbosom himself. "You have a conviction? What is it?" "His theory is that they are only mental images transferred by some unknown mental power to the plates." "What about the figure of your grandsire?" "His theory is that the figure was really the etheric self of my mother--shaped to the form like my grandsire by her own mind." She stared at him. "And you accept that?" "I don't know what else to believe. Yes, I accept that. I don't believe the dead have any right to talk and fool with the lives of the living the way I've been fooled with and side-tracked." His voice was full of fervor now. "I'm going to live my own life hereafter irrespective of the dead--responsible only to the living. I will not be disciplined by ghosts." The girl laid the photographs down softly and looked at him with frank admiration. "You're a very extraordinary young man," she said, sagely.