s departure from home. She enclosed the
item he had read on the train.

I thought you might not see it.

I have seen Miss Fanny and she has got him put into a room by himself.
Oh, poor Rides-Down-Everything I have been thinking so constantly of his
mother and it seemed to me that I have never seen her more distinctly.
How lovely she was--and how she loved him!

If Lucy had not written this letter Eugene might not have done the odd
thing he did that day. Nothing could have been more natural than that
both he and Lucy should have thought intently of Isabel after reading
the account of George's accident, but the fact that Lucy's letter had
crossed his own made Eugene begin to wonder if a phenomenon of telepathy
might not be in question, rather than a chance coincidence. The
reference to Isabel in the two letters was almost identical: he and
Lucy, it appeared, had been thinking of Isabel at the same time--both
said "constantly" thinking of her--and neither had ever "seen her more
distinctly." He remembered these phrases in his own letter accurately.

Reflection upon the circumstance stirred a queer spot in Eugene's
brain--he had one. He was an adventurer; if he had lived in the
sixteenth century he would have sailed the unknown new seas, but having
been born in the latter part of the nineteenth, when geography was a
fairly well-settled matter, he had become an explorer in mechanics.
But the fact that he was a "hard-headed business man" as well as an
adventurer did not keep him from having a queer spot in his brain,
because hard-headed business men are as susceptible to such spots as
adventurers are. Some of them are secretly troubled when they do not see
the new moon over the lucky shoulder; some of them have strange, secret
incredulities--they do not believe in geology, for instance; and some of
them think they have had supernatural experiences. "Of course there was
nothing in it--still it was queer!" they say.

Two weeks after Isabel's death, Eugene had come to New York on urgent
business and found that the delayed arrival of a steamer gave him a
day with nothing to do. His room at the hotel had become intolerable;
outdoors was intolerable; everything was intolerable. It seemed to him
that he must see Isabel once more, hear her voice once more; that he
must find some way to her, or lose his mind. Under this pressure he
had gone, with complete scepticism, to a "trance-medium" of whom he had
heard wild accounts from th