and temptations of the world. His present without flaw, and his future
assured, what was to prevent his gifts from flowering thickly
and unceasingly in their peaceful soil and atmosphere of calm? He
remembered that his first irresistible impulse to write had come
on the night he had met her. Would he owe to her his final power to
speak, as he had owed to that other--

He sat suddenly erect, then leaned forward, gazing at the fire with
eyes from which all languor had vanished. He felt as if a flash of
lightning had been projected into his brain. That other? Who was that
other?--why was she so marvellously like Weir? Her grandmother? Yes,
but why had he felt for Weir that sense of recognition and spiritual
kinship the moment he had seen her?

He sprang to his feet and strode to the middle of the room. Great
God! Was Weir reëmbodied as well as himself? Lady Sionèd Penrhyn was
indisputably the woman he had loved in his former existence--that was
proved once for all by the scene in the gallery at Rhyd-Alwyn and
by the letters he had found addressed to her. He recalled Weir's
childhood experience. Had she really died, and the desperate,
determined spirit of Sionèd Penrhyn taken possession of her body?
Otherwise, why that sense of affinity, and her strange empire over him
the night of their mutual vision? There was something more than racial
resemblance in form and feature between Sionèd and Weir Penrhyn; there
was absolute identity of soul and mind.

He strode rapidly from one end of the room to the other. Every
nerve in his body seemed vibrating, but his mind acted rapidly and
sequentially. He put the links together one by one, until, from the
moment of his last meeting with Sionèd Penrhyn at Constantinople to