spot where his strange visitor had been.

The place was vacant.

My friend, in relating this, blamed himself severely that he had allowed a natural diffidence to prevent his asking his neighbors whether they had seen the “Great Mogul,” as he began facetiously to dub the phantom in his thoughts. “But,” he added, “nobody likes to be taken for a raving idiot, even by a stranger. They certainly looked as if they had seen the figure, but I couldn’t make up my mind to ask.”

Reaching home, John found that his wife had been prematurely but safely delivered of a lusty son. The messenger sent to his office had missed him, and at the time of the appearance in the car, he declares that[150] he was not consciously even thinking of his wife’s condition at all.

[150]

When he had time to collect his thoughts after this second visitation, Vantine came firmly to the resolution that if he were ever favored with a third sight of the “Great Mogul,” he would at least endeavor to discover whether the phantom were appreciable by the sense of touch. He read much about “astral appearances,” and a good many more things of the sort, of which my own knowledge is too limited to permit my writing at all. He formed a hundred theories, and he began to get somewhat confused, to use his own expression, in regard to his identity. He was half convinced that by some mis-working of the law of re-incarnation, the spirit of some Eastern potentate had been put into his body.

“Or,” said he, with a whimsicality which was evidently deeply tinctured with a serious feeling, “that I had got into somebody’s else body. If I had known any possible way of stopping the thing, it wouldn’t have been so bad; but to have the ‘Great Mogul’ pop up like a jack-in-a-box, without any warning, was taking me at a disadvantage that I think decidedly unfair.”

Not to lengthen unnecessarily a simple[151] story, the speculations and investigations of Vantine may be passed over, and the narrative confined to the bare facts.

[151]

It was when John’s boy was about two months old that the embassy which had greeted John upon his wedding morning, or one closely resembling it, put in an appearance in honor of the child’s birth. The child and its mother were taking their first drive, and Vantine came home to luncheon rather earlier than usual, to find them out. He went into the library, but had scarcely 

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