tween Amy and himself that august shadow that is
called Death.... And in spite of the assurances he had received, even
at the hands of his own senses, that this was indeed the same girl
that he had known on earth, there was a strange awe mingled with his
old rather shallow passion. There were moments, as he sat alone in his
rooms at night, when it rose almost to terror; just as there were
other moments when awe vanished for a while, and his whole being was
flooded with an extraordinary ecstatic semi-earthly happiness at the
thought that he and she could yet speak with one another.... Imagine,
if you please, a child who on returning home finds that his mother has
become Queen, and meets her in the glory of ermine and diadem....

But the real deciding point--which, somehow, he knew must come--the
moment at which these conflicting notes should become a chord, was
fixed for Sunday evening next. Up to now he had had evidence of her
presence, he had received intelligible messages, though fragmentary
and half stammered through the mysterious veil, he had for an instant
or two looked upon her face; but the real point, he hoped, would come
in two days. The public _seances_ had not impressed him. He had been
to three or four of these in a certain road off Baker Street, and had
been astonished and disappointed. The kind of people that he had met
there--sentimental bourgeois with less power of sifting evidence than
the average child, with a credulity that was almost supernatural--the
medium, a stout woman who rolled her eyes and had damp fat fingers;
the hymn-singing, the wheezy harmonium, the amazing pseudo-mystical
oracular messages that revealed nothing which a religiose fool could
not invent--in fact the whole affair, from the sham stained-glass
lamp-shade to the ghostly tambourines overhead, the puerility of the
tricks played on the inquirers, and all the rest of it--this seemed as
little connected with what he had experienced with Mr. Vincent as a
dervish dance with High Mass. He had reflected with almost ludicrous
horror upon the impression it would make on Maggie, and the remarks it
would elicit.

But this other engagement was a very different matter.

They were going to attempt a further advance. It had, indeed, been
explained to him that these attempts were but tentative and
experimental; it was impossible to dictate exactly what should fall;
but the object on Sunday night was to go a step further, and to bring
about,