gs of which he had dreamed--an actuality which his religion had
somehow succeeded in evading. It was not that Laurie had been
insincere in his religion; there had been moments, and there still
were, occasionally, when the world that the Catholic religion preached
by word and symbol and sacrament, became apparent; but the whole thing
was upon a different plane. Religion bade him approach in one way,
spiritualism in the other. The senses had nothing to do with one; they
were the only ultimate channels of the other. And it is
extraordinarily easy for human beings to regard as more fundamentally
real the evidence of the senses than the evidence of faith....

Here then were the two choices--a world of spirit, to be taken largely
on trust, to be discerned only in shadow and outline upon rare and
unusual occasions of exaltation, of a particular quality which had
almost lost its appeal; and a world of spirit that took shape and form
and practical intelligibility, in ordinary rooms and under very nearly
ordinary circumstances--a world, in short, not of a transcendent God
and the spirits of just men made perfect, of vast dogmas and theories,
but of a familiar atmosphere, impregnated with experience, inhabited
by known souls who in this method or that made themselves apparent to
those senses which, Laurie believed, could not lie.... And the point
of contact was Amy Nugent herself....

As regards his exact attitude to this girl it is more difficult to
write. On the one side the human element--those associations directly
connected with the senses--her actual face and hands, physical
atmosphere and surroundings--those had disappeared; they were
dispersed, or they lay underground; and it had been with a certain
shock of surprise, in spite of the explanations given to him, that he
had seen what he believed to be her face in the drawing-room in
Queen's Gate. But he had tried to arrange all this in his
imagination, and it had fallen into shape and proportion again. In
short, he thought he understood now that it is character which gives
unity to the transient qualities of a person on earth, and that, when
those qualities disappear, it is as unimportant as the wasting of
tissue: when, according to the spiritualists' gospel that character
manifests itself from the other side, it naturally reconstitutes the
form by which it had been recognized on earth.

Yet, in spite of this sense of familiarity with what he had seen,
there had fallen be