“You’re less clever than I thought, with your books and that, if you didn’t,” he grunted.

“But ...  Good God, man!”

“Queer, isn’t it?  But you don’t know the queerest ...”

He pondered for a moment, and then suddenly put his lips to my ear.

“I’ll tell you,” he whispered. “It gets harder every time!...  At first, he just slipped through:  a bit of a catch at my heart, like when you nod off to sleep in a chair and jerk up awake again; and away he went.  But now it’s getting grinding, sluggish; and the pain....  You’d notice, that night on the road, the little check it gave me; that’s past long since; and last night, when I’d just braced myself up stiff to meet it, and you tapped me on the shoulder ...”  He passed the back of his hand over his brow.

“I tell you,” he continued, “it’s an agony each time.  I could scream at the thought of it.  It’s oftener, too, now, and he’s getting stronger.  The end-osmosis is getting to be ex-osmosis—­is that right?  Just let me tell you one more thing—­”

But I’d had enough.  I’d asked questions the night before, but now—­well, I knew quite as much as, and more than, I wanted.

“Stop, please,” I said.  “You’re either off your head, or worse.  Let’s call it the first.  Don’t tell me any more, please.”

“Frightened, what?  Well, I don’t blame you.  But what would you do?”

“I should see a doctor; I’m only an engineer,” I replied.

“Doctors?...  Bah!” he said, and spat.

I hope you see how the matter stood with Rooum.  What do you make of it?  Could you have believed it—­do you believe it?...  He’d made a nearish guess when he’d said that much of our knowledge is giving names to things we know nothing about; only rule-of-thumb Physics thinks everything’s explained in the Manual; and you’ve always got to remember one thing:  You can call it Force or what you like, but it’s a certainty that things, solid things of wood and iron and stone, would explode, just go off in a puff into space, if it wasn’t for something just as inexplicable as that that Rooum said he felt in his own person.  And if you can swallow that, it’s a relatively small matter whether Rooum’s light-footed Familiar slipped through him unperceived, or had to struggle through obstinately.  You see now why I said that “a queer thing overtook Rooum.”

More:  I saw it.  This thing, that outrages reason—­I saw it happen.  That is to say, I saw its effects, and it was in broad daylight, on an ordinary afternoon, in the middle of Oxford Street, of all places.  There wasn’t a shadow of doubt about it.  People were pressing and jostling about him, and suddenly I saw him turn his head and listen, as I’d seen him before.  I tell you, an icy creeping ran all over my skin.  I fancied I felt it approaching too, nearer and nearer....  The next moment he had made a sort of gathering of himself, as if against a gust.  He stumbled and thrust—­thrust with his body.  He swayed, physically, as a tree sways in a wind; he clutched my arm and gave a loud scream.  Then, after seconds—­minutes—­I don’t know how long—­he was free again.