“What an idea!” exclaimed he, impatiently.  “I might put my hands through it, like the flame of a candle.  It is nothing but vapor.  What is it made of?  Nothing but a snow-flake and the gas from cannel coal.  I saw it, myself, melting and falling together into this beautiful shape.  But then it is only a shape.  It is not a body.  Oh, but then it may be a soul!  Who knows what souls are made of?  Snow-flakes and vapor, perhaps.  Who knows indeed?”

He looked about the room.  Everything was in its natural and usual place.  The fire burned merrily; the wind swept fitfully without, and all was quiet within.  A very uncomfortable feeling, of mingled awe and curiosity, took possession of him.  He did not quite like to look at the shape.  He thought,—­

“Can this be the spiritual body that St. Paul says is to supersede the natural one?  If this is indeed, the soul of Annie Peyton,—­why, she knows, somehow, what is in mine.  And, by Jove!  I can see her soul now, too, without any trouble!  She can’t hide her real feelings now from me, any more than I can my character from her.  There’s some good in it, anyhow!”

With some effort, he raised his eyes,—­very respectfully, indeed; for though he was only about to look at a soul, he was full as much overpowered as if it had been the body.  His eyes fell.

“If I dared to look!  But she knows how I feel.  I suppose she sees me now,—­shivering from head to foot like a——­Somehow, I can’t look her in the eyes.  However, this won’t do!” And he looked quickly and timidly into the now smiling face.

He need not have been so timid.  If a soul could discern evil, it could, also, good; and this spirit was quick to see the last.  Without a word,—­but when were words necessary to souls?—­with only a glance, she expressed so much love and pity for him, that Fred was ashamed to look her in the face.  “Oh! if she could really see him,” he thought, “would she look so?” Perhaps so.  For the Intelligence that sees the evil can clearest of all see the mitigations, the causes, and the sore temptations; and the fruit of the widest knowledge is the widest love.

Something like this passed from the soul that sat opposite Fred into his awakening and sensitive consciousness:—­

“You have never tasted the pleasures of useful activity,” the sweet face said.  “Come with me, and we will look together, and see what good may come, and also what enjoyment, from it.”

Now it was, for the first time, that Fred fully understood his position.  It came like a gleam of light on his puzzled intellect, and made that quite clear which had before been so mystical and cloudy, that he had been ready to rub his eyes, and to doubt, almost, the evidence of his senses.  He remembered his old and a thousand times repeated theory of “projected images.”  Here it was.  Instead of a fancy, a thought, here was the whole of Annie Peyton’s soul (which, to be sure, had often enough occupied