ng bodily pain is a mere matter of
habit, as every one knows who has had to bear much, or who has tried it
as an experiment. In barbarous countries conspirators have practised
suffering the tortures likely to be inflicted on them to extract
confession.

Lamberti had never before been troubled by anything at all resembling
what people call the supernatural, nor even by anything unaccountable.
It was natural that he should be made nervous and almost ill by the
persistence of the dreams that had visited him since he had met Cecilia,
and by what he believed to be the closing of a door each time he awoke
from them.

Cecilia, on the contrary, had practised dreaming all her life and was
not permanently disturbed by any vision that presented itself, nor by
anything like a "phenomenon" which might accompany it. She felt that her
dreams brought her nearer to a truth of some sort, hidden from most of
the world, but of vital value, and after which she was groping
continually without much sense of direction. The specialist whom
Lamberti had consulted would have told her plainly that she had learned
to hypnotise herself, and a Japanese Buddhist monk would have told her
the same thing, adding that she was doing one of the most dangerous
things possible. The western man of science would have assured her that
a certain resemblance of the face in the dream to Lamberti was a mere
coincidence, and that since she had met him the likeness had perfected
itself, so that she now really dreamed of Lamberti; and the doctor would
have gone on to say that the rest of her vision was the result of
auto-suggestion, because the story of the Vestal Virgins had always had
a very great attraction for her. She had read a great deal about them,
she had followed Giacomo Boni's astonishing discoveries with breathless
interest, she knew more of Roman history than most girls, and probably
more than most men, and it was not at all astonishing that she should be
able to construct a whole imaginary past life with all its details and
even its end, and to dream it all at will, as if she were reading a
novel.

She would have admitted that the pictured history of Cecilia, the last
Vestal, had been at first fragmentary, and had gradually completed
itself in her visions, and that even now it was constantly growing, and
that it might continue to grow, and even to change, for a long time.

Further, if the specialist had known positively that similar fragments
of drea