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What a strange illusion that was! I tried to laugh at it afterwards, but at the moment horror stole through me–horror, and almost awe.

All desire of violence left me. Heat was dead; I felt cold as stone. I could not even speak a word.

Suddenly the white thing moved. The curtain was drawn sharply; the moonlight was blotted out; the room was plunged in darkness–a darkness in which that thing could see!

I turned and stole out of the room. I could have fled, driven by the nameless fear that was upon me.

Only when the morning dawned did the man in me awake, and I cursed myself for my cowardice.

*****

The following evening we were asked to dine out with some neighbours, who lived a few miles off in a wonderful old Norman castle near the sea. During the day neither of us had made the slightest allusion to the incidents of the previous night. We both felt it a relief to go into society, I think. The friends to whom we went–Lord and Lady Melchester–had a large party staying with them, and we were, I believe, the only outsiders who lived in the neighbourhood. One of their guests was Professor Black, whose name I have already mentioned–a little, dry, thin, acrid man, with thick black hair, innocent of the comb, and pursed, straight lips. I had met him two or three times in London, and as he had only just arrived at the castle, and scarcely knew his fellow-visitors there, he brought his wine over to me when the ladies left the dining-room, and entered into conversation. At the moment I was glad, but before we followed the women I would have given a year–I might say years–of my life not to have spoken to him, not to have heard him speak that night.

How did we drift into that fatal conversation? I hardly remember. We talked first of the neighbourhood, then swayed away to books, then to people. Yes, that was how it came about. The Professor was speaking of a man whom we both knew in town, a curiously effeminate man, whose every thought and feeling seemed that of a woman. I said I disliked him, and condemned him for his woman’s demeanour, his woman’s mind; but the Professor thereupon joined issue with me.

“Pity the fellow, if you like,” he uttered, in his rather strident voice; “but as to condemning him, I would as soon condemn a tadpole for not being a full-grown frog. His soul is beyond his power to manage, or even to coerce, you may depend upon it.”

Having sipped his port, he drew a little nearer to me, and slightly dropped his voice.

“There would be less censure of individuals in this world,” he said, “if people were only a little more thoughtful. These souls are like letters, and sometimes they are sealed up in the wrong envelope. For instance, a man’s soul may be put into a woman’s body, or vice versa. It has been so in D——‘s case. A mistake has been made.”

“By Providence?” I interrupted, with, perhaps, just a soupcon of sarcasm in my voice.

The Professor smiled.

“Suppose we imitate Thomas Hardy, and say by the President of the Immortals, who makes sport with more humans than Tess,” he answered. “Mistakes may be deliberate, just as their reverse may be accidental. Even a mighty power may condescend sometimes to a very practical joke. To a thinker the world is full of apple-pie beds, and cold wet sponges fall on us from at least half the doors we push open. The soul-juggleries of the before-mentioned President are very curious, but people will not realize that soul transference from body to body is as much a plain fact as the daily rising of the sun on one half of the world and its nightly setting on the other.”

“Do you mean that souls pass on into the world again on the death of the particular body in which they have been for the moment confined?” I asked.