vaded her strongly as it
pervades all Martian souls, till they reincarnate themselves among
us and forget.

And thus he was conscious of the north whenever she enjoyed the
hospitality of his young body.

She stuck to him for many years, till he offended her taste by his
looseness of life as a Guardsman (for she was extremely
straitlaced); and she inhabited him no more for some time, though
she often watched him through the eyes of others, and always loved
him and lamented sorely over his faults and follies.

Then one memorable night, in the energy of her despair at his
resolve to slip that splendid body of his, she was able to influence
him in his sleep, and saved his life; and all her love came back
tenfold.

She had never been able to impose a fraction of her will on any
being, animal or human, that she had ever inhabited on earth until
that memorable night in Malines, where she made him write at her
dictation.

Then she conceived an immense desire that he should marry the
splendid Julia, whom she had often inhabited also, that she might
one day be a child of his by such a mother, and go through her
earthly incarnation in the happiest conceivable circumstances; but
herein she was balked by Barty's instinctive preference for Leah,
and again gave him up in a huff.

But she soon took to inhabiting Leah a great deal, and found her
just as much to her taste for her own future earthly mother as the
divine Julia herself, and made up her mind she would make Barty
great and famous by a clever management of his very extraordinary
brains, of which she had discovered the hidden capacity, and
influence the earth for its good--for she had grown to love the
beautiful earth, in spite of its iniquities--and finally be a child
of Barty and Leah, every new child of whom seemed an improvement on
the last, as though practice made perfect.

Such is, roughly, the story of Martia.

There is no doubt--both Barty and Leah agreed with me in this--that
it is an easy story to invent, though it is curiously convincing to
read in the original shape, with all its minute details and their
verisimilitude; but even then there is nothing in it that the author
of _Sardonyx_ could not have easily imagined and made more
convincing still.

He declared that all through life on awaking from his night's sleep
he always felt conscious of having had extraordinary dreams--even as
a child--but that he forgot them in the very act of waking, in spite