such a case oath or law permitted, "Listen, Eunane," I
said, "and be calm. Not only Eveena, not only I, but hundreds,
thousands, of the best and kindliest men and women of your world hold
this faith as fast as we do. You feel what Eveena is. What she is and
what others are not, she owes to this trust:--to the assurance of a
Power unseen, that rules our lives and fortunes and watches our
conduct, that will exact an account thereof, that holds us as His
children, and will never part with us. Do you think it is a lie that
has made Eveena what she is?"

"But you _think_, you do not know."

"Yes, I know; I have seen." Here a touch, breaking suddenly upon that
intense concentration of mind and soul on a single thought, violently
startled me, gentle as it was; and to my horror I saw that Eveena was
kneeling with me by the couch.

"Remember," she said, in the lowest, saddest whisper, "'the Veil that
guards the Shrine.'"

"No matter, Eveena," I answered in the same tone, the pain at my heart
suppressing even the impulse of indignation, not with her, but with
the law that could put such a thought into her heart. "Neither penalty
nor oath should silence me now. Whether I break our law I know not;
but I would forfeit life here--I would forfeit life hereafter, rather
than fail a soul that rests on mine at such a moment."

The clasp of her hand showed how thoroughly, despite the momentary
doubt, she felt with me; and I could not now recur to that secondary
selfishness which had so imperiously repelled her from the
sick-chamber.

"I have seen," I repeated, as Eunane still looked earnestly into my
face, "and Eveena has seen at the same moment, one long ages since
departed this world--the Teacher of this belief, the Founder of that
Society which holds it, the ancestor of her own house--in bodily form
before us."

"It is true," said Eveena, in answer to Eunane's appealing look.

"And I," I added, "have seen more than once in my own world the forms
of those I have known in life recalled, according to promise, to human
eyes."

The testimony, or the contagion of the strong undoubting confidence we
felt therein, if they did not convince the intellect, changed the tone
of thought and feeling of the dying girl. Too weak now to reason, or
to resist the impression enforced upon her mind by minds always far
more powerful than her own in its brightest hours, she turned
instinctively from the thought of blackness, senselessness eternal