am convinced availed herself of the resources of the
lower magic to attain her ends. This goes far to explain the virulence
of the attack upon yourself, and why she is still able to carry on after
death the evil practices that formed her main purpose during life."

"You think that after death a soul can still consciously direct--"
gasped the author.

"I think, as I told you before, that the forces of a powerful
personality may still persist after death in the line of their original
momentum," replied the doctor; "and that strong thoughts and purposes
can still react upon suitably prepared brains long after their
originators have passed away.

"If you knew anything of magic," he pursued, "you would know that
thought is dynamic, and that it may call into existence forms and
pictures that may well exist for hundreds of years. For, not far
removed from the region of our human life, is another region where
floats the waste and drift of all the centuries, the limbo of the shells
of the dead; a densely populated region crammed with horror and
abomination of all descriptions, and sometimes galvanized into active
life again by the will of a trained manipulator, a mind versed in the
practices of lower magic. That this woman understood its vile commerce,
I am persuaded, and the forces she set going during her life have simply
been accumulating ever since, and would have continued to do so had they
not been drawn down upon yourself, and afterwards discharged and
satisfied through me.

"Anything might have brought down the attack, for, besides drugs, there
are certain violent emotions, certain moods of the soul, certain
spiritual fevers, if I may so call them, which directly open the inner
being to a cognizance of this astral region I have mentioned. In your
case it happened to be a peculiarly potent drug that did it."

"But now, tell me," he added, after a pause, handing to the perplexed
author a pencil-drawing he had made of the dark countenance that had
appeared to him during the night on Putney Hill--"tell me if you
recognize this face?"

Pender looked at the drawing closely, greatly astonished. He shuddered
as he looked.

"Undoubtedly," he said, "it is the face I kept trying to draw--dark,
with the great mouth and jaw, and the drooping eye. That is the woman."

Dr. Silence then produced from his pocket-book an old-fashioned woodcut
of the same person which his secretary had unearthed from the records of
the Newgate C