“You read the correspondence that followed the review?”
“Some of it.”
“My letter among others?”
“Yes! I remember every word of it now.”
“Then you recall my view as to the alleged necessity of a medium’s co-operation in these spirit-photographs?”
“You said it wasn’t necessary, if I remember,” replied Pocket somewhat tentatively, despite his boast.
“It was the pith and point of my contention! I mentioned the two moments at which I hold that a man’s soul may be caught apart, may be cut off from his body by no other medium than a good sound lens in a light-tight camera. You cannot have forgotten them if you read my letter.”
“One,” said the boy, “was the moment of death.”
“The moment of dissolution,” the doctor corrected him. “But there is a far commoner moment than that, one that occurs constantly to us all, whereas dissolution comes but once.”
Pocket believed he remembered the other instance too, but was not sure about it, the fact being that the whole momentous letter had struck him as too fantastic for serious consideration. That, however, he could not and dared not say; and he was not the less frightened of making a mistake with those inspired eyes burning fanatically into his.