“You need not take me up-stairs, Herbert,” I said, as we returned to the house.  “The picture of your father, which hangs in the large chamber projecting over the porch, was doubtless a good likeness of the mask he wore at city club-houses and family-dinners,—­but the man as you knew him here, how little does it resemble!  As for the Chinese cabinet which stands between the windows, it has associations, no doubt, but it is sadly out of repair.  Those pink tiles about the fireplace may be interesting to antiquaries; but I rather prefer the blue variety, as corresponding to the mental state in which their infinitely pretentious subjects and execrable drawing always put me.”

The lightness of speech was painfully forced.  Vannelle turned to me and said, slowly,—­

“Have you been here before?”

“No.”

“Has any one described to you this house or its contents?”

“No.”

“Then thought has been conveyed from mind to mind in unconditioned purity.  It is as I had supposed.  We are brothers forever.”

The next day, after an early breakfast, Vannelle summoned me to the study.  I glanced distrustfully at the confusion of the room, which seemed in strange contrast with the exquisitely neat and even fashionable attire of its proprietor.  A smile of proud pity touched the lips of Vannelle, as he seemed to divine my thought.  Then, as if I had read them in letters of light, these words seemed to answer me:—­

“Shall we, the stewards and guardians of the highest interests of mankind, fret our souls at trifles,—­we, who are to be instruments in marshalling the race from slavery and folly to wisdom and freedom?  Behold, in one bound, the hovels and palaces of earth shall be alike, and, floating free in spiritual space, we will win such dominion as the highest graduates in saintship dimly perceived, but were never able to declare!”

These thoughts, energizing the brain of my companion, seemed thrown into my consciousness with far more distinctness than if they had been uttered.  It was with awe that this mystic correspondence between mind and mind was made plain to me.  One man out of this myriad-bodied humanity had sought me out, and in his presence I was never more to be alone.  The gigantic shadow of self passed from me; I was as clay in the potter’s hands!

At length Herbert spoke.

“Our work in this world is determined for us; mine is allotted to me,—­not by my own choice.  I return to this house never to leave it till I go to join my father, with his great work more nearly completed than when it came to my hands.  At that table he died, with some glimpses of the promised land whither he tended,—­where he prayed that I might enter.”

There escaped from me a feeble remonstrance,—­no utterance of the heart, but rather a dry rattling of such conventional proprieties as lingered in the memory.

“And you intend to leave this wholesome world,—­you, whose career might be such as few have it in their power to choose?  You know, you must know, the wonderful gifts which you possess; you cannot alone be ignorant of the fascination you might exercise over man and woman.”