And now I am going to tell you a strange thing. It is this: I have
shadowed your life from the hour of your birth. I have watched your
career, and where able have guided and helped you, knowing that you
were one whom I could love. I have helped to make you what you are,
and therefore my right of possession is doubly founded, even though
my love be too great to lead you astray. Gradually I led you up to
the hour when all was ripe, and then mentally impressed you with
the letter which you thought you received, and which I knew would
affect you through your strongest characteristics--love of
adventure, and--curiosity--as well as from the fact that you were
susceptible to mental influence. You came, and I was happy--more
happy than you will ever know--until my unsated Karma thwarted my
plan, and showed that while seeking my own peace, I might possibly
endanger yours. That ended all. I could go no further. But even
now, as before, I shall come to you in spirit, during the still
hours of night; for my love is more intense and strangely different
from that which waking men are wont to feel. It is that which
sometimes comes in dreams. Do you not know what I mean?
You will feel bewildered on reading this, and at a loss to
understand many things, but remember that your inward or spiritual
sight has been opened through the power of hypnotism, and you must
not judge things as in your normal state.
When you reached our little station of Guir, you were expecting to
find me there, and expectation is the proper frame of mind in which
to produce a strong impression; and therefore, although you did not
know what I was like, Ah Ben and I together easily made you see me
as I was, together with the cart and horse; and although you
actually got into the stage which was waiting, you thought you were
in the cart with me. The incident of the broken spring was merely
suggested as a fitting means to bring you back physically from the
coach to the cart, where for the first time, in the moonlight, you
saw me in semi-material form, visible as a shadow to some men, but
wholly so to you. Had I appeared thus at the station, I should have
alarmed all who saw me, and so I came to you only. The two worlds
are so closely intermingled that men often live in one while their
bodies are in another, and to those who are susceptible, the
immaterial can be made more real than the other. I know these
things, because, while at home in neither, I have been in both.