“You presuppose a great deal, Bickley, including supernatural cunning and unexampled hypnotic influence.  I don’t know, first, why she should be so anxious to add another impression to the many we have received in this place; and, secondly, if she was, how she managed to mesmerise three average but totally different men into seeing the same things.  My explanation is that you were deceived as to the likeness, which, mind you, I did not recognise; nor, apparently, did Bastin.”

“Bastin never recognises anything.  But if you are in doubt, ask Yva herself.  She ought to know.  Now I’m off to try to analyse that confounded Life-water, which I suspect is of the ordinary spring variety, lightened up with natural carbonic acid gas and possibly not uninfluenced by radium.  The trouble is that here I can only apply some very elementary tests.”

So he went also, in an opposite direction to Bastin, and I was left alone with Tommy, who annoyed me much by attempting continually to wander off into the cave, whence I must recall him.  I suppose that my experiences of the day, reviewed beneath the sweet influences of the wonderful tropical night, affected me.  At any rate, that mystical side of my nature, to which I think I alluded at the beginning of this record, sprang into active and, in a sense, unholy life.  The normal vanished, the abnormal took possession, and that is unholy to most of us creatures of habit and tradition, at any rate, if we are British.  I lost my footing on the world; my spirit began to wander in strange places; of course, always supposing that we have a spirit, which Bickley would deny.

I gave up reason; I surrendered myself to unreason; it is a not unpleasant process, occasionally.  Supposing now that all we see and accept is but the merest fragment of the truth, or perhaps only a refraction thereof?  Supposing that we do live again and again, and that our animating principle, whatever it might be, does inhabit various bodies, which, naturally enough, it would shape to its own taste and likeness?  Would that taste and likeness vary so very much over, let us say, a million years or so, which, after all, is but an hour, or a minute, in the aeons of Eternity?

On this hypothesis, which is so wild that one begins to suspect that it may be true, was it impossible that I and that murdered man of the far past were in fact identical?  If the woman were the same, preserved across the gulf in some unknown fashion, why should not her lover be the same?  What did I say—­her lover?  Was I her lover?  No, I was the lover of one who had died—­my lost wife.  Well, if I had died and lived again, why should not—­why should not that Sleeper—­have lived again during her long sleep?  Through all those years the spirit must have had some home, and, if so, in what shapes did it live?  There were points, similarities, which rushed in upon me—­oh! it was ridiculous.  Bickley was right.  We were all mad!