ike a dream within a dream, before the eyes of the man upon the cross.
The evoker of spirits saw them too, and said that one of them held up his
arms and they were without hands. I thought of the two gravestones the man
in chain mail had passed over in the great hall when he came out of the
chapel, and asked the evoker of spirits if the knight was undergoing a
penance for violence, and while I was asking him, and he was saying that
it might be so but he did not know, the vision, having completed its
circle, vanished.

It had not, so far as I could see, the personal significance of the other
vision, but it was certainly strange and beautiful, though I alone seemed
to see its beauty. Who was it that made the story, if it were but a story?
I did not, and the seeress did not, and the evoker of spirits did not and
could not. It arose in three minds, for I cannot remember my acquaintance
taking any part, and it rose without confusion, and without labour, except
the labour of keeping the mind's eye awake, and more swiftly than any pen
could have written it out. It may be, as Blake said of one of his poems,
that the author was in eternity. In coming years I was to see and hear of
many such visions, and though I was not to be convinced, though half
convinced once or twice, that they were old lives, in an ordinary sense of
the word life, I was to learn that they have almost always some quite
definite relation to dominant moods and moulding events in this life. They
are, perhaps, in most cases, though the vision I have but just described
was not, it seems, among the cases, symbolical histories of these moods
and events, or rather symbolical shadows of the impulses that have made
them, messages as it were out of the ancestral being of the questioner.

At the time these two visions meant little more to me, if I can remember
my feeling at the time, than a proof of the supremacy of imagination, of
the power of many minds to become one, overpowering one another by spoken
words and by unspoken thought till they have become a single intense,
unhesitating energy. One mind was doubtless the master, I thought, but all
the minds gave a little, creating or revealing for a moment what I must
call a supernatural artist.

IV

Some years afterwards I was staying with some friends in Paris. I had got
up before breakfast and gone out to buy a newspaper. I had noticed the
servant, a girl who had come from the country some years before, laying
t