he lover of the piece with the last man who had happened to
impress her. Hence the resemblance."

"You presuppose a great deal, Bickley, including supernatural cunning
and unexampled hypnotic influence. I don't know, first, why she should
be so anxious to add another impression to the many we have received
in this place; and, secondly, if she was, how she managed to mesmerise
three average but totally different men into seeing the same things. My
explanation is that you were deceived as to the likeness, which, mind
you, I did not recognise; nor, apparently, did Bastin."

"Bastin never recognises anything. But if you are in doubt, ask
Yva herself. She ought to know. Now I'm off to try to analyse that
confounded Life-water, which I suspect is of the ordinary spring
variety, lightened up with natural carbonic acid gas and possibly not
uninfluenced by radium. The trouble is that here I can only apply some
very elementary tests."

So he went also, in an opposite direction to Bastin, and I was left
alone with Tommy, who annoyed me much by attempting continually to
wander off into the cave, whence I must recall him. I suppose that my
experiences of the day, reviewed beneath the sweet influences of the
wonderful tropical night, affected me. At any rate, that mystical
side of my nature, to which I think I alluded at the beginning of this
record, sprang into active and, in a sense, unholy life. The normal
vanished, the abnormal took possession, and that is unholy to most of us
creatures of habit and tradition, at any rate, if we are British. I lost
my footing on the world; my spirit began to wander in strange places;
of course, always supposing that we have a spirit, which Bickley would
deny.

I gave up reason; I surrendered myself to unreason; it is a not
unpleasant process, occasionally. Supposing now that all we see and
accept is but the merest fragment of the truth, or perhaps only a
refraction thereof? Supposing that we do live again and again, and that
our animating principle, whatever it might be, does inhabit various
bodies, which, naturally enough, it would shape to its own taste and
likeness? Would that taste and likeness vary so very much over, let
us say, a million years or so, which, after all, is but an hour, or a
minute, in the aeons of Eternity?

On this hypothesis, which is so wild that one begins to suspect that it
may be true, was it impossible that I and that murdered man of the
far past were in fact ide