“Do you mean to say that you told her to go ahead?”

“Certainly,” said Brown serenely.  “And she thanked me very prettily.  She’s well bred—­exceptionally.”

“Oh!  Then what did you do?”

“We talked a little while.”

“About what?”

“Well, for instance, I mentioned that curiously-baffling sensation which comes over everybody at times—­the sudden conviction that everything that you say and do has been said and done by you before—­somewhere.  Do you understand?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And she smiled and said that such sensations were merely echoes from the invisible psychic wire, and that repetitions from some previous incarnation were not unusual, particularly when the other person through whom the psychic current passed, was near by.”

“You mean to say that when a fellow has that queer feeling that it has all happened before, the—­the predestined girl is somewhere in your neighborhood?”

“That is what my pretty informant told me.”

“Who,” asked Smith, “is this pretty informant?”

“She asked permission to withhold her name.”

“Didn’t she ask you to subscribe?”

“No; she merely asked for the use of my name as reference for future clients if The Green Mouse Society was successful in my case.”

“What did you say?”

Brown laughed.  “I said that if any individual or group of individuals could induce me, within a year, to fall in love with and pay court to any living specimen of human woman I’d cheerfully admit it from the house-tops and take pleasure in recommending The Green Mouse to everybody I knew who yet remained unmarried.”

They both laughed.

“What rot we’ve been talking,” observed Smith, rising and picking up his suitcase.  “Here’s our station, and we’d better hustle or we’ll lose the boat.  I wouldn’t miss that week-end party for the world!”

“Neither would I,” said Beekman Brown.

IX

A CROSS-TOWN CAR

Concerning the Sudden Madness of One Brown

As the two young fellows, carrying their suitcases, emerged from the subway at Times Square into the midsummer glare and racket of Broadway and Forty-second Street, Brown suddenly halted, pressed his hand to his forehead, gazed earnestly up at the sky as though trying to recollect how to fly, then abruptly gripped Smith’s left arm just above the elbow and squeezed it, causing the latter gentleman exquisite discomfort.

“Here!  Stop it!” protested Smith, wriggling with annoyance.

Brown only gazed at him and then at the sky.

“Stop it!” repeated Smith, astonished.  “Why do you pinch me and then look at the sky?  Is—­is a monoplane attempting to alight on me? What is the matter with you, anyway?”

“That peculiar consciousness,” said Brown, dreamily, “is creeping over me.  Don’t move—­don’t speak—­don’t interrupt me, Smith.”