"'You believe she lives?'
"'As surely as I live. If I knew where she is to be found I would go and seek her.'
"In other men's judgment the calm manner in which he spoke of this mystic episode would have been accounted a species of madness; but I knew that he was perfectly sane, and that his brain was as clear and well balanced as my own.
"'For what reason would you seek her?' I asked.
"'I do not know,' he replied, and added, with a grave smile, 'perhaps because she is beautiful.'
"'You have fallen in love with a shadow, Silvain.'
"'It may be,' he said; 'I cannot say how it is--only that I think of her by day and dream of her by night. I wonder whether we shall ever meet!'
"'Cannot you tell?'
"'No, I cannot see into the future. All that comes to me in my dreams of and through Kristel belongs to the past and the present. There is no foreshadowing of what is to be. The picture I have seen of this beautiful girl is a reflex of what Kristel has seen in actual embodiment.'
"It would have been both unkind and ungenerous to throw ridicule upon these statements. To no man would Silvain have spoken as he spoke to me; he had, as it were, opened his soul to my gaze, and I should have been unworthy of friendship had I not received his confidences with respect. Nevertheless I could not bring myself to believe as he believed. I was soon to become a convert.