"Listen; you are one of those men who attempt to stifle their own
imagination. But in all completed intellect, imagination exists, and will
force its way; deny it healthful vents, and it may stray into morbid
channels. The death-room of Dr. Lloyd deeply impressed your heart, far
more than your pride would own. This is clear from the pains you took to
exonerate your conscience, in your generosity to the orphans. As the
heart was moved, so was the imagination stirred; and, unaware to yourself,
prepared for much that subsequently appealed to it. Your sudden love,
conceived in the very grounds of the house so associated with
recollections in themselves strange and romantic; the peculiar temperament
and nature of the girl to whom your love was attracted; her own visionary
beliefs, and the keen anxiety which infused into your love a deeper poetry
of sentiment,--all insensibly tended to induce the imagination to dwell on
the Wonderful; and, in overstriving to reconcile each rarer phenomenon to
the most positive laws of Nature, your very intellect could discover no
solution but in the Preternatural.

"You visit a man who tells you he has seen Sir Philip Derval's ghost; on
that very evening, you hear a strange story, in which Sir Philip's name is
mixed up with a tale of murder, implicating two mysterious pretenders to
magic,--Louis Grayle and the Sage of Aleppo. The tale so interests your
fancy that even the glaring impossibility of a not unimportant part of it
escapes your notice,--namely, the account of a criminal trial in which
the circumstantial evidence was more easily attainable than in all the
rest of the narrative, but which could not legally have taken place as
told. Thus it is whenever the mind begins, unconsciously, to admit the
shadow of the Supernatural; the Obvious is lost to the eye that plunges
its gaze into the Obscure. Almost immediately afterwards you become
acquainted with a young stranger, whose traits of character interest and
perplex, attract yet revolt you. All this time you are engaged in a