ered before you were impelled to do it. I knew how you must
have been driven by sorrow--driven against all the mental methods
and traditions of your life--into the arms of supernaturalism.
But you were simply doing what Hamlet would have done in such
circumstances--what Macbeth would have done, and what he would have
done who spoke to the human heart through their voices. All men, I
believe, have Macbeth's instinct for making 'assurance doubly sure,'
and I cannot imagine the man who, entangled as you were in a net of
conflicting evidence--the evidence of the spiritual and the
evidence of the natural world--would not, if the question were that
of averting a curse from acting on a beloved mistress, have done as
you did. That paralysis of Hamlet's will which followed when the
evidence of two worlds hung in equipoise before him, no one can
possibly understand better than I. For it was exactly similar to my
own condition on that never-to-be-forgotten night when she whom I
lost...

While the marvellous sight fell, or appeared to fall, upon my eyes,
my blood, like Hamlet's, became so masterful that my reason seemed
nothing but a blind and timorous guide. No sooner had the sweet
vision fled than my reason, like Hamlet's, rose and rejected it. It
was not until I became acquainted with the _rationale_ of sympathetic
manifestations--it was not till I learnt, by means of that
extraordinary book of your father's, which seems to have done its
part in turning friend Wilderspin's head, what is the supposed
method by which the spiritual world acts upon the material
world--acts by the aid of those same natural bonds which keep the
stars in their paths--that my blood and my reason became reconciled,
and a new light came to me. And I knew that this would be your case.
Yes, my dear Aylwin, I knew that when the issues of Life are greatly
beyond the common, and when our hearts are torn as yours has been
torn, and when our souls are on fire with a flame such as that which
I saw was consuming you, the awful possibilities of this universe--of
which we, civilised men or savage, know nothing--will come before us,
and tease our hearts with strange wild hopes, 'though all the
"proofs" of all the logicians should hold them up to scorn.'

I am, my dear Aylwin,

Your sincere Friend,

T. D'ARCY.

XVII

THE TWO DUKKERIPENS

Was the mystery at an end? Was there one point in this story of
stories which this letter of D'Arcy's had not clear