a reassuring
nature.

"An English physician," he told her, "was attending a lady, like
yourself, highly intelligent, who, like yourself, was in the habit of
seeing cats under her furniture, and was visited by phantoms. He
convinced her that these apparitions corresponded to nothing in reality.
She believed him, and worried herself no longer. One fine day, after a
long period of retirement, she reappeared in society, and on entering a
drawing-room she saw the lady of the house who, pointing to an
arm-chair, begged her to be seated. She also saw, seated in this chair,
a crafty-looking old gentleman. She argued to herself that one of the
two persons was necessarily a creature of the imagination, and, deciding
that the gentleman had no real existence, she sat down on the arm-chair.
On touching the bottom, she drew a long breath. From that day onward,
she never again set eyes on any further phantoms, either of man or of
beast. When smothering the crafty-looking old gentleman, she had
smothered them all--fundamentally."

Felicie shook her head, saying:

"That does not apply to this case."

She meant to say that her own phantom was not a grotesque old man, on
whom one could sit, but a jealous dead man who did not pay her visits
without some object. But she feared to speak of these things; and,
letting her hands fall upon her knees, she held her peace.

Seeing her thus, dejected and crushed, he pointed out that these
disorders of the vision were neither rare nor very serious, and that
they soon vanished without leaving any traces.

"I myself," he said, "once had a vision."

"You?"

"Yes, I had a vision, some twenty years ago. It was in Egypt."

He noticed that she was looking at him inquiringly, so he began the
story of his hallucination, having switched on all the electric lights,
in order to disperse the phantoms of darkness.

"In the days when I was practising in Cairo, I was accustomed, in the
February of each year, to go up the Nile as far as Luxor, and thence I
proceeded, in company with some friends, to visit the tombs and temples
in the desert. These trips across the sands are made on donkey-back. The
last time I went to Luxor I hired a young donkey-boy, whose white donkey
Rameses was stronger than the others. This donkey-boy, whose name was
Selim, was also stronger, slenderer, and better looking than the other
donkey-boys. He was fifteen years old. His shy, gentle eyes shone from
behind a magnificent veil