downwards toward the earth,--it was shaped like a white-winged
bird, and was here and there tenderly streaked with pink, as
though it had just travelled from some distant land where the sun
was rising. It was the only cloud in the sky,--and it had a
peculiar, almost phenomenal effect by reason of its rapid motion,
there being not the faintest breeze stirring. Alwyn watched it
gliding down the heavens till it had entirely disappeared, and
then began his meditations anew.

"Any one,--even without magnetic influence being brought to bear
upon him, might have visions such as mine! Take an opium-eater,
for instance, whose life is one long confused vista of visions,--
suppose he were to accept all the wild suggestions offered to his
drugged brain, and persist in following them out to some sort of
definite conclusion,--the only place for that man would be a
lunatic asylum. Even the most ordinary persons, whose minds are
never excited in any abnormal way, are subject to very curious and
inexplicable dreams,--but for all that, they are not such fools as
to believe in them. True, there is my poem,--I don't know how I
wrote it, yet written it is, and complete from beginning to end--
an actual tangible result of my vision, and strange enough in its
way, to say the least of it. But what is stranger still is that I
LOVE the radiant phantom that I saw ... yes, actually love her
with a love no mere woman, were she fair as Troy's Helen, could
ever arouse in me! Of course,--in spite of the contrary assertions
made by that remarkably interesting Chaldean monk Heliobas,--I
feel I am the victim of a brain-delusion,--therefore it is just as
well I should see this 'field of Ardath' and satisfy myself that
nothing comes of it--in which case I shall be cured of my craze."