"What a figure of an Egyptian, is he not!" he said to Courtney and
Denzil Murray. "Look at him! What height and symmetry! What a
world of ferocity in those black, slumbrous eyes! Yes, Monsieur
Gervase, I am talking about you. I am admiring you!"

"Trop d'honneur!" murmured Gervase, carefully shielding with one
hand the match with which he was kindling his cigarette.

"Yes," continued the Doctor, "I am admiring you. Being a little
man myself, I naturally like tall men, and as an investigator of
psychic forms I am immensely interested when I see a finely-made
body in which the soul lies torpid. That is why you unconsciously
compose for me a wonderful subject of study. I wonder now, how
long this torpidity in the psychic germ has lasted in you? It
commenced, of course, originally in protoplasm; but it must have
continued through various low forms and met with enormous
difficulties in attaining to individual consciousness as man,--
because even now it is scarcely conscious."

Gervase laughed.

"Why, that beginning of the soul in protoplasm is part of a creed
which the Princess Ziska was trying to teach me to-day," he said
lightly. "It's all no use. I don't believe in the soul; if I did,
I should be a miserable man."

"Why?" asked Murray.

"Why? Because, my dear fellow, I should be rather afraid of my