ours, and saw the red dot you made
against Saint-Savinien's day in your almanac."

Ursula uttered a piercing cry, which alarmed the priest; she remembered
the scene when, on returning to Nemours, her godfather read her soul,
and took away the almanac.

"If that is so," she said, "then my visions are possibly true. My
godfather has appeared to me, as Jesus appeared to his disciples. He was
wrapped in yellow light; he spoke to me. I beg you to say a mass for the
repose of his soul and to implore the help of God that these visions may
cease, for they are destroying me."

She then related the three dreams with all their details, insisting
on the truth of what she said, on her own freedom of action, on the
somnambulism of her inner being, which, she said, detached itself from
her body at the bidding of the spectre and followed him with perfect
ease. The thing that most surprised the abbe, to whom Ursula's veracity
was known, was the exact description which she gave of the bedroom
formerly occupied by Zelie at the post house, which Ursula had never
entered and about which no one had ever spoken to her.

"By what means can these singular apparitions take place?" asked Ursula.
"What did my godfather think?"

"Your godfather, my dear child, argued my hypothesis. He recognized
the possibility of a spiritual world, a world of ideas. If ideas are of
man's creation, if they subsist in a life of their own, they must have
forms which our external senses cannot grasp, but which are perceptible
to our inward senses when brought under certain conditions. Thus your
godfather's ideas might so enfold you that you would clothe them with
his bodily presence. Then, if Minoret really committed those actions,
they too resolve themselves into ideas; for all action is the result
of many ideas. Now, if ideas live and move in a spiritual world, your
spirit must be able to perceive them if it penetrates that world. These
phenomena are not more extraordinary than those of memory; and those of
memory are quite as amazing and inexplicable as those of the perfume of
plants--which are perhaps the ideas of the plants."

"How you enlarge and magnify the world!" exclaimed Ursula. "But to hear
the dead speak, to see them walk, act--do you think it possible?"

"In Sweden," replied the abbe, "Swedenborg has proved by evidence that
he communicated with the dead. But come with me into the library and
you shall read in the life of the famous Duc de Montmore