True!  Nothing left!  The whole world a desert, and Heaven itself without hope!  I pressed my hands to my eyes to try and cool their burning ache—­was it possible that what these voices said could be true?  They had ceased speaking, and there was a blessed silence.  As a kind of desperate resource, I took out the letter Rafel Santoris had written to me, and read its every word with an eager passion of yearning—­especially the one passage that ran thus—­“We—­you and I—­ who know that Life, being all Life, cannot die,—­ought to be wiser in our present space of time than to doubt each other’s infinite capability for love and the perfect world of beauty which love creates.”

‘Wiser than to doubt’!  Ah, I was not wise enough!  I was full of doubts and imagined evils—­and why?  Because of voices behind a wall!  Surely a foolish cause for sorrow!  I tried to extricate my mind from the darkness of despondency into which it had fallen, and to distract my attention from my own unhappy thoughts I glanced at the book which lay open before me.  As I looked, its title, printed in letters of gold, flashed on my eyes like a gleam of the sun—­’The Secret of Life.’  A sudden keen expectancy stirred in me—­I folded Rafel’s letter and slipped it back into its resting-place near my heart—­then I drew my chair close up to the table, and bending over the book began to read.  All was now perfectly still around me—­the voices had ceased.  Gradually I became aware that what I was reading was intended for my instruction, and that the book itself was a gift to me from Aselzion if I proved a ‘faithful student.’  A thrill of hope and gratitude began to relieve the cold weight upon my heart,—­ and I suddenly resolved that I would not listen to any more voices, even if they spoke again.

“Rafel Santoris is not dead!”—­I said aloud and resolutely—­“He could not so sever himself from me now!  He is not treacherous—­he is true!  He is not ‘fooling’ me—­he is relying upon me to believe in him.  And I will believe in him!—­my love and faith shall not be shaken by mere rumour!  I will give him no cause to think me weak or cowardly,—­I will trust him to the end!”

And with these words spoken to the air, I went on reading quietly in a stillness made suddenly fragrant with the scent of unseen flowers.

XVII

THE MAGIC BOOK

It is not possible here to transcribe more than a few extracts from the book on which my attention now became completely riveted.  The passages selected are chosen simply because they may by chance be useful to those few—­those very few—­who desire to make of their lives something more than a mere buy and sell business, and also because they can hardly be called difficult to understand.  When Paracelsus wrote ‘The Secret of Long Life’ he did so in a fashion sufficiently abstruse and complex to scare away all but the most diligent and persevering