another. You will understand, my dear man, I am speaking, as it were, by rote. God has mercifully ordered that the human brain works slowly; first the blow, hours afterwards the bruise. Oh, dear me, that man Hume—“on miracles”—positively amazing! So that too, please, you will be quite clear about. Credo—not quia impossible est, but because you, Lawford, have told me. Now then, if it won’t be too wearisome to you, the whole story.’ He sat, lean and erect in his big chair, a hand resting loosely on each knee, in one spectacles, in the other a dangling pocket handkerchief. And the dark, sallow, aquiline, formidable figure, with its oddly changing voice, re-told the whole story from the beginning. 

 ‘You were aware then of nothing different, I understand, until you actually looked into the glass?’ 

 ‘Only vaguely. I mean that after waking I felt much better, more alert. And my thoughts—’ 

 ‘Ah, yes, your thoughts?’ 

 ‘I hardly know—oh, clear as if I had had a real long rest. It was just like being a boy again. Influenza dispirits one so.’ 

 Mr Bethany gazed without stirring. ‘And yet, you know,’ he said, ‘I can hardly believe, I mean conceive, how—You have been taking no drugs, no quackery, Lawford?’ 

 ‘I never dose myself,’ said Lawford, with sombre pride. 

 ‘God bless me, that’s Lawford to the echo,’ thought his visitor. ‘And before—?’ he went on gently; ‘I really cannot conceive, you see, how a mere fit could... Before you sat down you were quite alone?’ He stuck out his head. ‘There was nobody with you?’ 

 ‘With me? Oh no,’ came the soft answer. 

 ‘What had you been thinking of? In these days of faith-cures, and hypnotism, and telepathy, and subliminalities—why, the simple old world grows very confusing. But rarely, very rarely novel. You were thinking, you say; do you remember, perhaps, just the drift?’ 

 ‘Well,’ began Lawford ruminatingly, ‘there was something curious even then, perhaps. I remember, for instance, I knelt down to read an old tombstone. There was a little seat—no back. And an epitaph. The sun was just setting; some French name. And there was a long jagged crack in the stone, like the black line you know one sees after lightning, I mean it’s as clear as that even now, in 

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