“At once. The very first day she let me in at the front door and asked if I wished to see her master, what name she might announce, and so forth.”
“It was all—er—unexpected and sudden like that?” came the question from a hundred others that crowded together in me. “To find a lost friend of years only—in such a way—the shock, I mean, to you——!” I simply could not find my words. He told it all so calmly, naturally. “You were wholly unprepared, weren’t you? Nothing had led you to expect?” I ended with a dash.
“Not wholly unprepared,” was his rejoinder; “nor was the meeting altogether unexpected—on my side, that is. Intimations, as I told you at Motfield Close twenty years ago—when she was born—had come to me. No soul draws breath for the first time, without a quiver of response running through all that lives. Souls intimately connected with each other may feel the summons. There are ways——! I knew that she was once more in the world, that, like ourselves, her soul had reincarnated; and ever since I have been searching——”
“Searching——!”
“There are clues that offer themselves—that come, perhaps in sleep, perhaps by direct experiment, and, regardless of space, give hints——”
“Psychometry?” I asked, remembering a word just coined.
He shrugged his shoulders. “All objects radiate,” he said, “no matter how old they are. Their radiation never ceases till they are disintegrated; and if you are sensitive you can receive their messages. If you have certain powers, due to relation and affinity, you may interpret them. There is an instantaneous linking-up—in picture-form—impossible to mistake.”
“You knew, then, she was somewhere on the earth—waiting for you?” I repeated, wondering what was coming next. That night in the Edinburgh lodgings, when he had been “searching,” came back to me.
“For us,” he corrected me. “It was something from a Private Collection that gave me the clue by which I finally traced her—something from the older sands.”
“The sands! Egyptian?”