"'And I you, Silvain. But, after all, why should we part? My time is my own; I have no arbitrary plan of travel mapped out. I will accompany you to Bavaria, and gain another friend in Kristel.'
"Silvain was delighted at the proposal, and eagerly accepted it. For my own part, although I did not confess it to Silvain, I was not entirely ingenuous in my offer. It was not prompted solely by friendship; an insatiable curiosity possessed me to ascertain the real facts of the case, and, as I have already said, to verify them in detail.
"'Kristel lives?' I said to Silvain.
"'As nearly,' he replied, 'as a man can be convinced of anything, the knowledge of which is acquired by spiritual means, so am I convinced that Kristel lives.'
"'And will recover?'
"'That is beyond me,' said Silvain gravely. 'I hope so--I pray so. You inspire strange thoughts, Louis. Though parted from Kristel by great distances, I hold communion with him while he lives. Were he to die, should I still hold communion with him?'
"The question startled me, holding out, but it did, an illimitable prospect of mysterious knowledge stretching as far as the portals of immortality."
Here Dr. Louis broke off in his narrative, and said, addressing himself immediately to me,
"In recalling these incidents of my youthful days, and of my connection with Silvain and Kristel, I am drawn insensibly into a fairly faithful depiction of the visionary ideas and speculations which sprang within me from time to time, and which afforded me food for thought. During a brief space I foolishly believed that the very question and truth of the immortality of the soul were involved in my studies of animal magnetism. Had I accepted this, had I allowed it to root itself firmly in my mind, I should have been profoundly unhappy. I can imagine no such grounds for misery to the intellectual man as lack of faith in a future state. I care not what shape or form it takes, so long as it is there. And this faith must of necessity be a blind faith. I have already expressed to you my conviction that a recognised science will arise out of the better knowledge which will be gained by certain hidden forces, but there are immortal secrets which will never be revealed to mankind. It appears to me to be necessary to make this clear to you, in order that you may not suppose that I am still wedded to the wild chimeras of youth."
I knew why Doctor Louis made this statement to me. The reminiscences he was recalling had rendered him for a little while oblivious of the present. His youth rose before him, in which his daughter Lauretta had no share. Suddenly he had remembered that I loved Lauretta, and the Father's heart spoke to the man whose most earnest desire it was to wed the cherished child.