“Ah! then that is why you joined your left hand with my right five minutes ago.  I wondered why you did it.”

“I!  Joined hands!”

“Yes.”

“I haven’t moved my hand.”

“My dear Val!  How is it holding mine then?”

“Don’t be absurd, Julian; my hand is not near yours.  Both my hands are just where they were when we sat down, on my side of the table.”

“Just where they were!  Your little finger has been tightly linked in mine for the last five minutes.  You know that as well as I do.”

“Nonsense!”

“But it is linked now while I am speaking.”

“I tell you it isn’t.”

“I’ll soon let you know it too.  There!  Ah! no wonder you have snatched it away.  You forget that my muscles are like steel, and that I can pinch as a gin pinches a rabbit’s leg.  I say, I didn’t really hurt you, did I?  It was only a joke to stop your little game.”

“I tell you,” Valentine said, almost angrily, “your hand has never once touched mine, nor mine yours.”

His accent of irritable sincerity appeared suddenly to carry conviction to the mind of Julian, for he sprang violently up from the table, and cried, in the darkness: 

“Then who the devil’s in the room with us?”

Valentine also, convinced that Julian had not been joking, was appalled.  He switched on the light, and saw Julian standing opposite to him, looking very white.  They both threw a rapid glance upon the room, whose dull green draperies returned their inquiry with the complete indifference of artistic inanimation.

“Who the devil’s got in here?” Julian repeated, with the savage accent of extreme uneasiness.

“Nobody,” Valentine replied.  “You know the thing’s impossible.”

“Impossible or not, somebody has found means to get in.”

Valentine shook his head.

“Then you were lying?”

“Julian, what are you saying?  Don’t go too far.”

“Either you were, or else a man has been sitting at that table between us, and I have held his hand, the hand of some stranger.  Ouf!”

He shook his broad shoulders in an irrepressible shudder.

“I was not lying, Julian.  I tell you so, and I mean it.”

Valentine’s eyes met Julian’s, and Julian believed him.

“Put your hands on the table again,” Julian said.

Valentine obeyed, and Julian laid his beside them, linking one of his little fingers tightly in one of Valentine’s, and at the same time shutting his eyes.  After a long pause he grew visibly whiter, and hastily unlinked his finger.

“No, damn it, Val, I hadn’t hold of your hand.  The hand I touched was much harder, and the finger was bigger, thicker.  I say, this is ghastly.”

Again he shook himself, and cast a searching glance upon the little room.

“Somebody has been in here with us, sitting between us in the dark,” he repeated.  “Good God, who is it?”