She held my hands, looking at me wistfully.

“You will go away,”—­she said, in a low tone—­“and we shall perhaps never meet again.  I don’t think it likely we shall.  People often try to meet again and never do—­haven’t you noticed that?  It seems fated that they shall only know each other for a little while just to serve some purpose, and then part altogether.  Besides, you live in a different world from ours.  You believe in things that I can’t even understand—­You think there is a God—­and you think each human being has a soul—­”

“Are you not taught the same in your churches?” I interrupted.

She looked startled.

“Oh yes!—­but then one never thinks seriously about it!  You know that if we did think seriously about it we could never live as we do.  One goes to church for convention’s sake—­because it’s respectable; but suppose you were to say to a clergyman that if your soul is ‘immortal’ it follows in reason that it must always have existed and always will exist, he would declare you to be ‘unorthodox.’  That’s where all the puzzle and contradiction comes in—­so that I don’t believe in the soul at all.”

“Are you sure you do not?” I enquired, meaningly.

She was silent.  Then she suddenly broke out.

“Well, I don’t want to believe in it!  I don’t want to think about it!  I’d rather not!  It’s terrible!  If a soul has never died and never will die, its burden of memories must be awful!—­horrible!—­no hell could be worse!”

“But suppose they are beautiful and happy memories?” I suggested.

She shuddered.

“They couldn’t be!  We all fail somewhere.”

This was true enough, and I offered no comment.

“I feel,”—­she went on, hesitatingly—­“that you are leaving us for some undiscovered country—­and that you will reach some plane of thought and action to which we shall never rise.  I don’t think I am sorry for this.  I am not one of those who want to rise.  I should be perfectly content to live a few years in a moderate state of happiness and then drop into oblivion—­and I think most people are like me.”

“Very unambitious!” I said, smiling.

“Yes—­I daresay it is—­but one gets tired of it all.  Tired of things and people—­at least I do.  Now that man Santoris—­”

Despite myself, I felt the warm blood flushing my cheeks.

“Yes?  What of him?” I queried, lightly.

“Well, I can understand that he has always been alive!” and she turned her eyes upon me with an expression of positive dread—­ “Immensely, actively, perpetually alive!  He seems to hold some mastery over the very air!  I am afraid of him—­terribly afraid!  It is a relief to me to know that he and his strange yacht have gone!”

“But, Catherine,”—­I ventured to say—­“the yacht was not really ’strange,’—­it was only moved by a different application of electricity from that which the world at present knows.  You would not call it ‘strange’ if the discovery made by Mr. Santoris were generally adopted?”