ll were in possession of his dirty
brown bag and some tourist clothes. I paid a few francs in settlement of
his debt, and have sent his luggage on to him. The daughter was absent
from home, but the proprietress, a large woman very much as he described
her, told my secretary that he had seemed a very strange, absent-minded
kind of gentleman, and after his disappearance she had feared for a long
time that he had met with a violent end in the neighbouring forest where
he used to roam about alone.

"I should like to have obtained a personal interview with the daughter
so as to ascertain how much was subjective and how much actually took
place with her as Vezin told it. For her dread of fire and the sight of
burning must, of course, have been the intuitive memory of her former
painful death at the stake, and have thus explained why he fancied more
than once that he saw her through smoke and flame."

"And that mark on his skin, for instance?" I inquired.

"Merely the marks produced by hysterical brooding," he replied, "like
the stigmata of the _religieuses_, and the bruises which appear on the
bodies of hypnotised subjects who have been told to expect them. This is
very common and easily explained. Only it seems curious that these marks
should have remained so long in Vezin's case. Usually they disappear
quickly."

"Obviously he is still thinking about it all, brooding, and living it
all over again," I ventured.

"Probably. And this makes me fear that the end of his trouble is not
yet. We shall hear of him again. It is a case, alas! I can do little to
alleviate."

Dr. Silence spoke gravely and with sadness in his voice.

"And what do you make of the Frenchman in the train?" I asked
further--"the man who warned him against the place, _a cause du sommeil
et a cause des chats?_ Surely a very singular incident?"

"A very singular incident indeed," he made answer slowly, "and one I can
only explain on the basis of a highly improbable coincidence--"

"Namely?"

"That the man was one who had himself stayed in the town and undergone
there a similar experience. I should like to find this man and ask him.
But the crystal is useless here, for I have no slightest clue to go
upon, and I can only conclude that some singular psychic affinity, some
force still active in his being out of the same past life, drew him thus
to the personality of Vezin, and enabled him to fear what might happen
to him, and thus to warn him as he did.