“If that is so,” she said, “then my visions are possibly true.  My godfather has appeared to me, as Jesus appeared to his disciples.  He was wrapped in yellow light; he spoke to me.  I beg you to say a mass for the repose of his soul and to implore the help of God that these visions may cease, for they are destroying me.”

She then related the three dreams with all their details, insisting on the truth of what she said, on her own freedom of action, on the somnambulism of her inner being, which, she said, detached itself from her body at the bidding of the spectre and followed him with perfect ease.  The thing that most surprised the abbe, to whom Ursula’s veracity was known, was the exact description which she gave of the bedroom formerly occupied by Zelie at the post house, which Ursula had never entered and about which no one had ever spoken to her.

“By what means can these singular apparitions take place?” asked Ursula.  “What did my godfather think?”

“Your godfather, my dear child, argued my hypothesis.  He recognized the possibility of a spiritual world, a world of ideas.  If ideas are of man’s creation, if they subsist in a life of their own, they must have forms which our external senses cannot grasp, but which are perceptible to our inward senses when brought under certain conditions.  Thus your godfather’s ideas might so enfold you that you would clothe them with his bodily presence.  Then, if Minoret really committed those actions, they too resolve themselves into ideas; for all action is the result of many ideas.  Now, if ideas live and move in a spiritual world, your spirit must be able to perceive them if it penetrates that world.  These phenomena are not more extraordinary than those of memory; and those of memory are quite as amazing and inexplicable as those of the perfume of plants—­which are perhaps the ideas of the plants.”

“How you enlarge and magnify the world!” exclaimed Ursula.  “But to hear the dead speak, to see them walk, act—­do you think it possible?”

“In Sweden,” replied the abbe, “Swedenborg has proved by evidence that he communicated with the dead.  But come with me into the library and you shall read in the life of the famous Duc de Montmorency, beheaded at Toulouse, and who certainly was not a man to invent foolish tales, an adventure very like yours, which happened a hundred years earlier at Cardan.”

Ursula and the abbe went upstairs, and the good man hunted up a little edition in 12mo, printed in Paris in 1666, of the “History of Henri de Montmorency,” written by a priest of that period who had known the prince.

“Read it,” said the abbe, giving Ursula the volume, which he had opened at the 175th page.  “Your godfather often re-read that passage, —­and see! here’s a little of his snuff in it.”

“And he not here!” said Ursula, taking the volume to read the passage.