r soul, I made my presence known when I did, and before the
conclusion had been reached--"

"My safety! The danger, then, was real. They were alive and--" Words
failed him. He stopped in the road and turned towards his companion, the
shining of whose eyes he could just make out in the gloom.

"It was a concourse of the shells of violent men, spiritually developed
but evil men, seeking after death--the death of the body--to prolong
their vile and unnatural existence. And had they accomplished their
object you, in turn, at the death of your body, would have passed into
their power and helped to swell their dreadful purposes."

Harris made no reply. He was trying hard to concentrate his mind upon
the sweet and common things of life. He even thought of silk and St.
Paul's Churchyard and the faces of his partners in business.

"For you came all prepared to be caught," he heard the other's voice
like some one talking to him from a distance; "your deeply introspective
mood had already reconstructed the past so vividly, so intensely, that
you were _en rapport_ at once with any forces of those days that chanced
still to be lingering. And they swept you up all unresistingly."

Harris tightened his hold upon the stranger's arm as he heard. At the
moment he had room for one emotion only. It did not seem to him odd that
this stranger should have such intimate knowledge of his mind.

"It is, alas, chiefly the evil emotions that are able to leave their
photographs upon surrounding scenes and objects," the other added, "and
who ever heard of a place haunted by a noble deed, or of beautiful and
lovely ghosts revisiting the glimpses of the moon? It is unfortunate.
But the wicked passions of men's hearts alone seem strong enough to
leave pictures that persist; the good are ever too lukewarm."

The stranger sighed as he spoke. But Harris, exhausted and shaken as he
was to the very core, paced by his side, only half listening. He moved
as in a dream still. It was very wonderful to him, this walk home under
the stars in the early hours of the October morning, the peaceful forest
all about them, mist rising here and there over the small clearings, and
the sound of water from a hundred little invisible streams filling in
the pauses of the talk. In after life he always looked back to it as
something magical and impossible, something that had seemed too
beautiful, too curiously beautiful, to have been quite true. And, though
at the time he