which had
most impressed me I had already committed to writing, in the fear
that, otherwise, my fancy might forge for its own thraldom the links
of reminiscence which my memory might let fall from its chain. Faber
listened with a silence only interrupted by short pertinent questions;
and when I had done, he remained thoughtful for some moments; then the
great physician replied thus:--

"I take for granted your conviction of the reality of all you tell
me, even of the Luminous Shadow, of the bodiless Voice; but, before
admitting the reality itself, we must abide by the old maxim, not to
accept as cause to effect those agencies which belong to the
Marvellous, when causes less improbable for the effect can be rationally
conjectured. In this case are there not such causes? Certainly there
are--"

"There are?"

"Listen; you are one of those men who attempt to stifle their own
imagination. But in all completed intellect, imagination exists, and
will force its way; deny it healthful vents, and it may stray into
morbid channels. The death-room of Dr. Lloyd deeply impressed your
heart, far more than your pride would own. This is clear from the
pains you took to exonerate your conscience, in your generosity to the
orphans. As the heart was moved, so was the imagination stirred; and,
unaware to yourself, prepared for much that subsequently appealed to
it. Your sudden love, conceived in the very grounds of the house so
associated with recollections in themselves strange and romantic;
the peculiar temperament and nature of the girl to whom your love was
attracted; her own visionary beliefs, and the keen anxiety which infused
into your love a deeper poetry of sentiment,--all insensibly tended to
induce the imagination to dwell on the Wonderful; and, in overstriving
to reconcile each rarer phenomenon to the most positive laws of Nature,
your very intellect could discover no solution but in the Preternatural.

"You visit a man who tells you he has seen Sir Philip Derval's ghost; on
that very evening, you hear a strange story, in which Sir Philip's name
is mixed up with a tale of murder, implicating two mysterious pretenders
to magic,--Louis Grayle and the Sage of Aleppo. The tale so interests
your fancy that even the glaring impossibility of a not unimportant part
of it escapes your notice,--namely, the account of a criminal trial in
which the circumstantial evidence was more easily attainable than in all
the rest of the narrativ