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