“I am always so when I leave the chateau.”

Minna quivered.

“A strange being lives there, Monsieur Becker,” he continued after a pause.  “For the six months that I have been in this village I have never yet dared to question you about her, and even now I do violence to my feelings in speaking of her.  I began by keenly regretting that my journey in this country was arrested by the winter weather and that I was forced to remain here.  But during the last two months chains have been forged and riveted which bind me irrevocably to Jarvis, till now I fear to end my days here.  You know how I first met Seraphita, what impression her look and voice made upon me, and how at last I was admitted to her home where she receives no one.  From the very first day I have longed to ask you the history of this mysterious being.  On that day began, for me, a series of enchantments.”

“Enchantments!” cried the pastor shaking the ashes of his pipe into an earthen-ware dish full of sand, “are there enchantments in these days?”

“You, who are carefully studying at this moment that volume of the ‘Incantations’ of Jean Wier, will surely understand the explanation of my sensations if I try to give it to you,” replied Wilfrid.  “If we study Nature attentively in its great evolutions as in its minutest works, we cannot fail to recognize the possibility of enchantment —­giving to that word its exact significance.  Man does not create forces; he employs the only force that exists and which includes all others namely Motion, the breath incomprehensible of the sovereign Maker of the universe.  Species are too distinctly separated for the human hand to mingle them.  The only miracle of which man is capable is done through the conjunction of two antagonistic substances.  Gunpowder for instance is germane to a thunderbolt.  As to calling forth a creation, and a sudden one, all creation demands time, and time neither recedes nor advances at the word of command.  So, in the world without us, plastic nature obeys laws the order and exercise of which cannot be interfered with by the hand of man.  But after fulfilling, as it were, the function of Matter, it would be unreasonable not to recognize within us the existence of a gigantic power, the effects of which are so incommensurable that the known generations of men have never yet been able to classify them.  I do not speak of man’s faculty of abstraction, of constraining Nature to confine itself within the Word,—­a gigantic act on which the common mind reflects as little as it does on the nature of Motion, but which, nevertheless, has led the Indian theosophists to explain creation by a word to which they give an inverse power.  The smallest atom of their subsistence, namely, the grain of rice, from which a creation issues and in which alternately creation again is held, presented to their minds so perfect an image of the creative word, and of the abstractive word, that to them it was easy to apply the same system