This argument was based on the Reincarnationist belief that everyone's parents are chosen for them only to ensure that they are given the sort of start in life best suited to provide them with an opportunity to learn whatever lessons are decreed for them in their new incarnation; and that they are their own father in the sense that their egos have already been formed by certain of their experiences during a long succession of past lives.

In support of this contention the speaker drew attention to that passage in the Second Commandment to the effect that God would 'visit the sins of the fathers upon the children even unto the third and fourth generation'.

'Could any sane person,' Mr. Silcox asked, 'believe a just god capable of showing such vicious malice as to threaten the innocent and unborn with dire chastisement for evil done by their physical parents or grandparents?' Clearly the explanation of this apparently harsh decree was that, each of us being spiritually the child of the personality we had created for ourselves in previous lives, if we did evil in our present incarnation we should have to pay for it in the future, and it might take us three or four more incarnations before we had fully worked off our debt.

All this was new to Barney and, far from being bored as he had expected, he found it deeply interesting; so for the next half-hour he gave his mind almost entirely to following Mr. Silcox's interpretation of the sayings of Our Lord.

Mary, on the other hand, was hardly listening. The main arguments for Reincarnation were already known to her, and her thoughts had gone back five years to the last time she had seen Barney. That had been in the grey dawn of early morning in a room of a small hotel in Dublin. He had not long got out of the bed they had shared and, having dressed, he had kissed her goodbye with the cheerful words:

'I'll see you again soon, sweetheart, and we'll have better fun next time.' But there had been no next time and, although she had searched high and low for him, she had never seen him again until tonight. With a sick feeling she went back in her mind over the whole sordid story of her life as Mary McCreedy.