Ludington had learned all there was to be known about the persons and
places of old Hilton, entered with much interest into the conversation of
the ladies on the subject, and after tea accompanied them in their stroll
through that part of the village which they had not inspected before.

When they returned to the house it was quite dark, and they had lights in
the sitting-room, and refreshments were served. Mrs. Slater's eyes were
frequently drawn toward the picture over the fireplace, and some
reference of hers to the immortelles in which it was framed, turned the
conversation upon the subject that Miss Ludington and she had been
discussing in the school-house.

Mrs. Slater, whose conversation showed her to be a woman of no great
culture, but unusual force of character and intelligence, expressed
herself as interested in the idea of the immortality of past selves, but
decidedly sceptical. Paul grew eloquent in maintaining its truth and
reasonableness, and, indeed, that it was the only intelligible theory of
immortality that was possible. The idea that the same soul successively
animated infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, and maturity, was, he
argued, but a modification of the curious East Indian dream of
metempsychosis, according to which every soul is supposed to inhabit in
turn innumerable bodies.

"You almost persuade me," said Mrs. Slater, at last. "But I never heard
of the spirit of anybody's past self appearing to them. If there are such
spirits, why have they never manifested themselves? Nobody every heard of
the spirit of one's past self appearing at a spiritualist séance, for
instance."

"There is one evidence among others," replied Paul. "that spiritualism is