eedless to say from that time forward
Godfrey's intimacy with this charming and wealthy hostess was in every
way encouraged by the Boiset family.

The course of this intimacy does not need any very long description.
Every Sunday after church the well-appointed carriage and pair appeared
and bore Godfrey away to luncheon at the Villa Ogilvy. Here he always
met Madame Riennes, Colonel Josiah Smith, and Professor Petersen; also
occasionally one or two others with whom these seemed to be
sufficiently intimate to admit of their addressing them as "Brother" or
"Sister."

Soon Godfrey came to understand that they were all members of some kind
of semi-secret society, though what this might be he could not quite
ascertain. All he made sure of was that it had to do with matters which
were not of this world. Nothing concerning mundane affairs, however
important or interesting, seemed to appeal to them; all their
conversation was directed towards what might be called spiritual
problems, reincarnations, Karmas (it took him a long time to understand
what a Karma is), astral shapes, mediumship, telepathic influences,
celestial guides, and the rest.

At first this talk with its jargon of words which he did not
comprehend, bored him considerably, but by degrees he felt that he was
being drawn into a vortex, and began to understand its drift. Even
while it was enigmatic it acquired a kind of unholy attraction for him,
and he began to seek out its secret meaning in which he found that
company ready instructors.

"Young brother," said Madame Riennes, "we deal with the things not of
the body, but of the soul. The body, what is it? In a few years it will
be dust and ashes, but the soul--it is eternal--and all those stars you
study are its inheritance, and you and I, if we cultivate our spiritual
parts, shall rule in them."

Then she would roll her big eyes and become in a way magnificent, so
that Godfrey forgot her ugliness and the repulsion with which she
inspired him.

In the end his outlook on life and the world became different, and this
not so much because of what he learned from his esoteric teachers, as
through some change in his internal self. He grew to appreciate the
vastness of things and the infinite possibilities of existence. Indeed,
his spiritual education was a fitting pendant to his physical study of
the heavens, peopled with unnumbered worlds, each of them the home,
doubtless, of an infinite variety of life, and eac