My own distress lasted some hours, but slowly improved, the jolts of pain growing less, and at longer intervals, and succumbing to my complete restoration.
The next day found Gabrielle and myself talking in the garden at the same spot where we had conceived of the seance; we had both been almost feverishly waiting the opportunity to rehearse our experience. We met almost as if by agreement, walking down the garden, on opposite sides at the same time, as to a rendez-vous.
I related everything to Gabrielle as I had seen it, and asked her about her own experience. I said, "Gabrielle, I think that it is best not to indulge this power of yours any longer. It was a disappointment every way, and the results only unhealthy and stupid."
"Alfred," she replied, "I have often brought back the spirits of the dead, not by my own will but because they came to me willingly, and it has never hurt me. It seemed a delight rather, and the sensations were blissful. But it was all different last night. It was spoiled somehow. There was some discord, something improper in our thoughts—in yours, Alfred?"
"Gabrielle, just what happened to yourself, when you fell away in the trance?"
"I seemed to be rising upward on wings, with sunny lights shining upon me, and the endless shimmering of spirit bodies about me, and then came a darkness with a despairing feeling of loneliness and of desertion, and then a slow, consuming pain until you waked me."
"Gabrielle, have you ever actually seen the spirits? Were they, as the jargon goes, materialized before your eyes?"
"Not exactly, perhaps. They came to me in my sleep, but I have indeed—so it seems to me—awakened and found the air about me filled with shapes. They did not last, wavering away with swingings this way and that, but their faces smiled as they went off, and a low pleasant light remained; that too gently—doucement—fading away."
We walked slowly back again towards the house, quite silent. I, buried in a reverie of self-dissatisfaction, Gabrielle doubtless in one of afflicted wonder. At length I said, stopping abruptly, and turning Gabrielle towards me, as I often did, with my two hands clasping her shoulders, "Gabrielle, let us agree to banish these practices. It may cost you an effort, but I believe it is best for both of us. We shall lose our wits with these devilments." Gabrielle resented that, and her face showed her protest. "Well, not that exactly," I added quickly, "let us call them illusions. Some scientific wiseacres call them hypnagogic illusions. It is not altogether normal and reasonable and—" I hesitated a moment, and Gabrielle added, "You mean improper, unhealthy, unsafe?"