"Whither are you being driven in this mad stampede after so-called progress and knowledge? In what morass will this mocking will-o'-the-wisp ultimately entice and overwhelm you?... I see chicanery and disbelief possess your churches and their priests; a clinging to stipends and a craving for personal leadership seem to me to have become the sole guides of such as are themselves supposed to guide their flocks. Everywhere change, restlessness, cynicism, vulgarity, extravagance, crime, hypocrisy, covetousness, greed, cringing, selfishness in every form are rampant; what sensitive mind would not instinctively recoil from contact with such a changing world? Can a nature such as your own endure to be associated with such a mass of passive squalor and of active evil? Are you not more than ready to welcome some chance of escape from such an uncongenial environment?... "As you confess in your heart the utter collapse of your early aims here on Earth--so must you recognise your unique chance to attain to something higher than even you dreamed of in your youthful moods of hope and ambition. You will be reincarnated as the Child of the Sun, after you are once translated to Meleager. That is a part, but a part only, of The Secret, which perhaps already you are inclined to regard as The Fraud. And yet, if fraud it be, its ultimate aim is a beneficent and unselfish one, for it has been practised in order to keep a whole population happy and content...." * * * * * "And herewith I think I had now better give you some instructions, or rather hints, as to your new position and as to your proper attitude towards the governing caste of Meleager on your arrival there. As King, the Child of the Sun is invested with a species of sovereignty that has no exact counter-part on your Earth. Your high office in Meleager partakes in some respects of the nature of a King of England, of a Pope of Rome, of an old-time Sultan of Baghdad, of a modern colonial governor; yet it is itself no one of these things. To sustain your part you will be reincarnated after your long sleep, and you will awake to find yourself endued with a fresh supply of youth and energy, whilst all your acquired learning and ripe experience of a lifetime already more than half consumed will abide in your brain. There now remains for you the final stage of all on Earth, that of putting yourself and your future unreservedly and confidently in my hands...." There followed an abrupt spell of silence in which d'Aragno scrutinised me closely. I knew not why, but I had begun to experience a sort of repulsion against his arrogance in thus presuming obedience on my part before ever I had signified my assent. I felt in some wise bound to protest against this assumption of my readiness to obey, and accordingly I made a protest rather out of personal vanity than from any depth of rebellious feeling.