I left the car.  Nothing of the kind happened.  I had already left it at the florist’s, and that whole passage of experience which was so vividly and circumstantially stamped in my memory that I related it four or five times over, and would have made oath to every detail of it, was pure invention, or, rather, it was something less positive:  the reflex of the first half of my horse-car experience, when I really did put the picture in the corner next me, and did keep my hand on it.”

“Very strange,” I was beginning, but just then the door opened and Mrs. Minver came in, and I was presented.

She gave me a distracted hand, as she said to her husband:  “Have you been telling the story about that picture again?” He was still holding it.  “Silly!”

She was a mighty pretty woman, but full of vim and fun and sense.

“It’s one of the most curious freaks of memory I ever heard of, Mrs. Minver,” I said.

Then she showed that she was proud of it, though she had called him silly.  “Have you told,” she demanded of her husband, “how oddly your memory behaved about the subject of the picture, too?”

“I have again eaten that particular piece of humble-pie,” Minver’s brother replied.

“Well,” she said to me, “I think he was simply so possessed with the awfulness of having lost the picture that all the rest took place prophetically, but unconsciously.”

“By a species of inverted presentiment?” I suggested.

“Yes,” she assented, slowly, as if the formulation were new to her, but not unacceptable.  “Something of that kind.  I never heard of anybody else having it.”

Minver had got his pipe alight, and was enjoying it. “I think Joe was simply off his nut, for the time being.”

IV

A CASE OF METAPHANTASMIA

The stranger was a guest of Halson’s, and Halson himself was a comparative stranger, for he was of recent election to our dining-club, and was better known to Minver than to the rest of our little group, though one could not be sure that he was very well known to Minver.  The stranger had been dining with Halson, and we had found the two smoking together, with their cups of black coffee at their elbows, before the smouldering fire in the Turkish room when we came in from dinner—­my friend Wanhope the psychologist, Rulledge the sentimentalist, Minver the painter, and myself.  It struck me for the first time that a fire on the hearth was out of keeping with a Turkish room, but I felt that the cups of black coffee restored the lost balance in some measure.

Before we had settled into our wonted places—­in fact, almost as we entered—­Halson looked over his shoulder and said:  “Mr. Wanhope, I want you to hear this story of my friend’s.  Go on, Newton—­or, rather, go back and begin again—­and I’ll introduce you afterwards.”