practice of sorcery in the middle ages.  She was surprised to learn that she was not only a believer, but was apparently an adept in all the esoteric arts.  But the subject being quite new to her, she followed with difficulty his account of a very successful evocation of the spirit of a mediaeval alchemist, a Fleming of the fourteenth century, and wonder often interrupted her attention.  She could not reconcile herself to the belief that he was serious in all he said, and he often spoke of the Kabbala, which apparently was the secret ritual of a sect of which he was a member, perhaps a priest.  Between whiles she thought of the indignation with which Owen would hear such beliefs.  Then tempted as by the edge of an abyss, she admired Ulick’s strange appearance, which helped to make his story credible.  She could no longer disbelieve, so simply did he tell his tales, his white teeth showing, and his dark eyes rapidly brightening and clouding as he mentioned different spells and their effects.  But so illusive were his narratives that she never quite understood; he seemed always a little ahead of her; she often had to pause to consider his meaning, and when she had grasped it, he was speaking of something else, and she had missed the links.  To understand him better she attempted to argue with him, and he told her of the incredible explanation that Charcot, the eminent hypnotist, had had to fall back upon in order to account materialistically for some of his hypnotic experiments, and she was forced to admit that the spiritualistic explanation was the easier to believe.

She was most interested when he spoke of the College of Adepts and the Rosicrucians.  Life as he spoke seemed to become intense and exalted, and the invisible seemed on the point of becoming visible when he told her how the brotherhood greeted each other with, “Man is God, and son of God, and there is no God but man.”  He repeated all he could remember of their terrible oath.  The College of Adepts, she learned, was the antithesis of the monastery.  The monastery is passive spirituality, the College of Adepts is active spirituality; the monastery abases itself before God, the Adepts seek to become as gods.  “There is a spiritual stream,” he said, “that flows behind the circumstance of history, and they claim that all religions are but vulgarisations of their doctrine.  The Adept, by conquering passion and ignorance, attains a mastery over change, and so prolongs his life beyond any human limit.”

She begged Ulick not to forget to bring the book of magic which contained the oath of the Rosicrucians.