nd be powerless to warn others! To be
obliged to smile whilst one's heart is wrung with anguish and one's
brain tortured with nameless apprehensions; that is indeed misery!"

"Dear me!" I said, nervously; "I hope you don't foresee any catastrophe
about to overwhelm _me_?"

She gazed straight into my eyes, and her passionate face gradually
softened into a lovely smile.

"No, my only friend!" she exclaimed, taking my hand gently in hers; "so
far, no cloud darkens the perfect happiness of our intercourse!"

I felt that there were moments of compensation even in the pursuit of
the Black Arts!

III.

It was a curious sensation, mixing again with the commonplace
pleasure-seekers at Longacres, conscious that I was the repository of
such extraordinary revelations. For, before we left our damp retreat,
Irene had confided in me the secret history of her life. Not that I
understood it very clearly, owing to her voice being continually choked
by stifled emotion. But I gathered that a person, presumably of the male
sex, who was vaguely designated as the Beloved, had perished in some
frightful manner before her eyes, and ever since that time she had
devoted herself to the study of the occult sciences in the firm
conviction that it was possible to discover a medium of communication
with the Unseen World. She now persisted that I had been designated by
unerring proofs as that medium. She assured me that, months previously,
she had foreseen my arrival at Longacres in the precise fashion in which
it really took place.

"Every detail," she said, "was exactly foreshadowed in the vision. Not
only did I recognise you at once by your clothes (which were different
from those of the other men present), but your voice seemed familiar to
me, as if I had known you for years. I saw you gazing at me with what I
fondly believed to be a look of mutual recognition. I remember rising
from my seat in a species of ecstatic trance to which I am liable in
moments of excitement. I have a faint recollection of addressing you
with an impassioned appeal for help, to which you responded with icy
indifference, but the rest of our interview remains a blank. Only there
was a cruel sense of disappointment: instead of meeting as two spirits
whose interests were inseparable, you denied any previous knowledge of
me, and even manifested a sort of terrified aversion at my approach. I
saw you shrink away from my side; then nothing remained for me but to
tempora