be ultimately restored.

He said, "Observe! her mind was first roused from its slumber by the
affectionate, unconquered impulse of her heart. You were absent; the
storm alarmed her, she missed you,--feared for you. The love within
her, not alienated, though latent, drew her thoughts into definite
human tracks. And thus, the words that you tell me she uttered when
you appeared before her were words of love, stricken, though as yet
irregularly, as the winds strike the harp-strings from chords of
awakened memory. The same unwonted excitement, together with lengthened
exposure to the cold night-air, will account for the shock to her
physical system, and the languor and waste of strength by which it has
been succeeded."

"Ay, and the Shadow that we both saw within the threshold. What of
that?"

"Are there no records on evidence, which most physicians of very
extended practice will perhaps allow that their experience more or
less tend to confirm--no records of the singular coincidences between
individual impressions which are produced by sympathy? Now, whether you
or your Lilian were first haunted by this Shadow I know not. Perhaps
before it appeared to you in the wizard's chamber it had appeared to
her by the Monks' Well. Perhaps, as it came to you in the prison, so it
lured her through the solitudes, associating its illusory guidance with
dreams of you. And again, when she saw it within your threshold, your
fantasy, so abruptly invoked, made you see with the eyes of your Lilian!
Does this doctrine of sympathy, though by that very mystery you two
loved each other at first,--though, without it, love at first sight were
in itself an incredible miracle,--does, I say, this doctrine of sympathy
seem to you inadmissible? Then nothing is left for us but to revolve the
conjecture I before threw out. Have certain organizations like that of
Margrave the power to impress, through space, the imaginations of those
over whom they have forced a control? I know not. But if they have, it
is not supernatural; it is but one of those operations in Nature so rare
and exceptional, and of which testimony and evidence are so imperfect
and so liable to superstitious illusions, that they have not yet been
traced--as, if truthful, no doubt they can be, by the patient genius of
science--to one of those secondary causes by which the Creator ordains
that Nature shall act on Man."

By degrees I became dissatisfied with my conversations with Faber. I