“I—­worship real belief—­of any kind,” he stammered, for her words and the close proximity of her atmosphere caused a strange upheaval in his heart that he could not account for.  He faltered in his speech.  “It is the most vital quality in life—­rarer than deity.”  He was using her own phrases even.  “It is creative.  It constructs the world anew—­”

“And may reconstruct the old.”

She said it, lifting her face above him a little, so that her eyes looked down into his own.  It grew big and somehow masculine.  It was the face of a priest, spiritual power in it.  Where, oh where in the echoing Past had he known this woman’s soul?  He saw her in another setting, a forest of columns dim about her, towering above giant aisles.  Again he felt the Desert had come close.  Into this tent-like hall of the hotel came the sifting of tiny sand.  It heaped softly about the very furniture against his feet, blocking the exits of door and window.  It shrouded the little present.  The wind that brought it stirred a veil that had hung for ages motionless....

She had been saying many things that he had missed while his mind went searching.  “There were types of life the Atlantean system knew it might revive—­life unmanifested to-day in any bodily form,” was the sentence he caught with his return to the actual present.

“A type of life?” he whispered, looking about him, as though to see who it was had joined them; “you mean a—­soul?  Some kind of soul, alien to humanity, or to—­to any forms of living thing in the world to-day?” What she had been saying reached him somehow, it seemed, though he had not heard the words themselves.  Still hesitating, he was yet so eager to hear.  Already he felt she meant to include him in her purposes, and that in the end he must go willingly.  So strong was her persuasion on his mind.

And he felt as if he knew vaguely what was coming.  Before she answered his curious question—­prompting it indeed—­rose in his mind that strange idea of the Group-Soul:  the theory that big souls cannot express themselves in a single individual, but need an entire group for their full manifestation.

He listened intently.  The reflection that this sudden intimacy was unnatural, he rejected, for many conversations were really gathered into one.  Long watching and preparation on both sides had cleared the way for the ripening of acquaintance into confidence—­how long he dimly wondered?  But if this conception of the Group-Soul was not new, the suggestion Lady Statham developed out of it was both new and startling—­and yet always so curiously familiar.  Its value for him lay, not in far-fetched evidence that supported it, but in the deep belief which made it a vital asset in an honest inner life.