o
you, Roger, you may not make him hear you though you call with great
force."

"How do you know that, Desire?"

"But by simple reading! Do not Ennemoser and many writers record it?"

"Have you spoken to such beings, Desire?"

The question was rash, but it escaped me before I could check the
impulse. To my relief, she answered without resentment:

"No."

"No? The Thing--the enemy that comes to me has never spoken to you?"

"No."

I was silent in amazement and incredulity. The dark creature claimed
her, she declared herself helpless to escape from that dominion into
normal life, and yet It never had spoken to her? It spoke to me, a
stranger most ignorant, and not to the seeress who was familiar with Its
existence and the lore which linked humanity to Its fearful kind?

"You do not believe me," her voice came quietly across my thoughts.

"I believe you, of course," I stammered. "I was only--astonished. You
have described It, and the Barrier, so often; from the first night----!
I supposed you had seen all I have, and more."

"All you have seen? Now tell me with what eyes you have seen the Barrier
and the Far Frontier? The eyes of the body, or that vision by which man
sees in a dream and which is to the sight as the speech of spirits is to
the hearing?"

"I suppose--with the inner sight."

"Then understand me when I say that I have seen with the eyes of
another, by a sight not mine and yet my own."

"You mean," I floundered in vague doubts and jealousy of her human
associations of which I knew nothing. "You mean--hypnotism?"

She laughed with half-sad raillery.

"How shall I answer you, Roger? Once upon a time, the jewel called beryl
was thought unrivaled as a mirror into which a magician might look to
see reflected events taking place at a distance, or reflections of the
future. But by and by magicians grew wiser. They found any crystal would
serve as well as a beryl. Later still, they found a little water poured
in a basin or held in the hollow of the hand showed as true a fantasm.
So one wrote: '_There is neither crystallomancy nor hydromancy, but the
magick is in the Seer himself._'"

"Well, Desire?"

"Well, Roger--if to see with the sight of another is hypnotism, then
every man who writes a book or tells a good tale is a hypnotist; every
historian who makes us see the past is a necromancer."

"You read of the Thing----?"

"No," she replied, after a long pause. "I knew It through sympathy with