"Dead!" echoed Morton, in horror.
"Dead, sir! They sent round word early this morning to say that she died at midnight sharp."
Morton staggered into his study, slamming the door in the man's face. He threw himself into the deep reclining-chair which Margaret Revaleon had occupied, and pressed his head between his hands in a desperate endeavor to collect his wits.
Hark! was it a repeating voice, or some mad phantasy, the coinage of his excited brain, that reproduced those thrilling words:
"You will be called to attend a dying woman,—you are called, already is the messenger here. A woman's soul is trembling upon the threshold of eternity. If you are alone with her when that soul takes wing, my spirit will instantly take its place—and your skill will do the rest. Accomplish the resurrection of that body and secure our further communion."
Two women were approaching the threshold of death and two messengers were waiting to summon him while those portentous words were being uttered! To which of the two should he have gone? Which one was intended, destined for the promised reincarnation?
CHAPTER VI.
"A sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of men
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."
Morton roused from his passing stupor to find himself in a highly hysterical condition. He was inclined to laugh; in fact he did laugh in a mirthless way, with sobbing accent that closely resembled the act of weeping. He strove to assure himself that he had been the dupe of his own over-taxed nerves; that his present condition was wholly due to the excessive tension of his mental powers and want of sleep. He even went so far as to smilingly pledge his presumptive happiness in a copious dose of valerian. Thus armed with a species of Dutch courage, he threw himself upon a lounge and sought composure. If his wife's spirit, he reasoned, were omnipresent in all conditions and under all circumstances that pertained to him, as had been represented, and if that spirit were anxious to be reincarnate, as he had been given to understand that it was, why in the name of all that was rational, should it desert him, simply because he hastened to attend one dying woman instead of another? What possible difference could it make which corporeal attire it assumed? was it not reasonable to assume that a spirit, presumably clairvoyant, would pursue its affinity as the magnet seeks the pole, and appropriate any earthly guise, since the power was granted it? Was not Romaine Effingham's body as well fitted for its reinstatement in the flesh as another's?
True, the late Miss Casson had possessed a certain fascination for him, which had been commented upon before he went abroad to meet his fate, and naturally enough his wife had divined the ci-devant but now defunct spell when she took her place in his circle, and, woman-like, had rallied him upon it.