ctres. You have been ill, you have been
excited, you have been taking drugs; add to this that on that
occasion you were in a state of almost frenzy, and you can at once
account for the whole thing on the grounds of a stimulated
imagination and weak or diseased optic nerves. I can bring forward
from various treatises on the optic nerves hundreds of cases as
singular as yours, and apparently as unaccountable. Indeed, if I find
that this matter continues to affect you so deeply," he continued,
with a faint smile, "my first duty will be to read up exclusively on
the subject, and have a number of books sent here to you, so as to
let you see and judge for yourself."

CHAPTER LXVII.

A SHOCK.

Gualtier made still further explanations on this point, and mentioned
several special cases of apparitions and phantom illusions of which
he had read. He showed how in the lives of many great men such things
had taken place. The case of Brutus was one, that of Constantine
another. Mohammed, he maintained, saw real apparitions of this sort,
and was thus prepared, as he thought, for the prophetic office. The
anchorites and saints of the Middle Ages had the same experience.
Jeanne d'Arc was a most conspicuous instance. Above all these stood
forth two men of a later day, the representatives of two opposite
principles, of two systems which were in eternal antagonism, yet
these two were alike in their intense natures, their vivid
imaginations, and the force of their phantom illusions. Luther threw
his ink-bottle at the head of the devil, and Loyola had many a
midnight struggle with the same grim personage.

To all this Hilda listened attentively, understanding fully his
theory, and fully appreciating the examples which he cited in order
to illustrate that theory, whether the examples were those well-known
ones which belong to general history, or special instances which had
come under his own personal observation. Yet all his arguments and
examples failed to have any effect upon her whatever. After all there
remained fixed in her mind, and immovable, the idea that she had seen
the dead, and in very deed; and that Zillah herself had risen up
before her eyes to confound her at the moment of the execution of her
vengeance. Such a conviction was too strong to be removed by any
arguments or illustrations. That conviction, moreover, had been
deepened and intensified by the horror which had followed when she
had fled in mad fear, feeli