words they used to me--"

"I know it all," the stranger said quietly. "I saw and heard everything.
My plan first was to wait till the end and then to take steps for their
destruction, but in the interest of your personal safety,"--he spoke
with the utmost gravity and conviction,--"in the interest of the safety
of your soul, I made my presence known when I did, and before the
conclusion had been reached--"

"My safety! The danger, then, was real. They were alive and--" Words
failed him. He stopped in the road and turned towards his companion, the
shining of whose eyes he could just make out in the gloom.

"It was a concourse of the shells of violent men, spiritually developed
but evil men, seeking after death--the death of the body--to prolong
their vile and unnatural existence. And had they accomplished their
object you, in turn, at the death of your body, would have passed into
their power and helped to swell their dreadful purposes."

Harris made no reply. He was trying hard to concentrate his mind upon
the sweet and common things of life. He even thought of silk and St.
Paul's Churchyard and the faces of his partners in business.

"For you came all prepared to be caught," he heard the other's voice
like some one talking to him from a distance; "your deeply introspective
mood had already reconstructed the past so vividly, so intensely, that
you were _en rapport_ at once with any forces of those days that chanced
still to be lingering. And they swept you up all unresistingly."

Harris tightened his hold upon the stranger's arm as he heard. At the