would learn or see behind them? And
by degrees, as he worked, always with one ulterior object in his mind,
his scruples vanished or were mastered by the growth of his longing,
till this became his ruling passion--to behold the spirit of Stella.
Now he no longer reasoned with himself, but openly, nakedly, in his
own heart gave his will over to the achievement of this monstrous and
unnatural end.

How was it to be done? That was now the sole dilemma which tormented
him--as the possible methods of obtaining the drink he craves, or the
drug that gives him peace and radiant visions, torment the dipsomaniac
or the morphia victim in his guarded prison. He thought of his
instruments, those magic machines with the working of which Stella had
been familiar in her life. He even poured petitions into them in the
hope that these might be delivered far beyond the ken of man, only to
learn that he was travelling a road which led to a wall impassable; the
wall that, for the lack of a better name, we call Death, which bars the
natural from the spiritual.

Wonderful as were his electrical appliances, innumerable as might be
their impalpable emanations, insoluble as seemed the mystery of their
power of catching and transmitting sounds by the agency of ether, they
were still physical appliances producing physical effects in obedience
to the laws of nature. But what he sought lay beyond nature and was
subject to some rule of which he did not even know the elements, and
much less the axioms. Herein his instruments, or indeed, any that man
could make, were as futile and as useless as would be the prayers of an
archbishop addressed to a Mumbo-jumbo in a fetish house. The link was
wanting; there was, and could be, no communication between the two.
The invisible ether which he had subdued to his purposes was still a
constituent part of the world of matter; he must discover the spiritual
ether, and discover also the animating force by which it might be
influenced.

Now he formed a new plan--to reach the dead by his petitions, by the
invocation of his own spirit. "Seek me and you shall find me," she had
said. So he sought and called in bitterness and concentration of heart,
but still he did not find. Stella did not come.

He was in despair. She had promised, and her promise seemed to be
broken. Then it was that in turning the pages of her diary he came
across a passage that had escaped him, or which he had forgotten. It ran
thus:

"In the r