“Yes.”

And absurdly, as he said it, he felt like a man who tosses the dice for life or death.

CHAPTER IX

THE FOURTH SITTING

They turned the light off and sat down in silence.  Then Julian said: 

“Keep your hands well away from mine, Val.”

“I will.”

They had not been sitting for five minutes before Valentine felt that the atmosphere was becoming impregnated with a certain heaviness of mystery, with a certain steady and unyielding dreariness hanging round them like a cloud.  They were once again confronted by a strange reality.  Surely they were.  Valentine felt it, silently knew it.

In this blackness he seemed at length to step forward and to stand upon the very threshold of an abyss, beyond which, in vague vapours, lay things unknown, creatures unsuspected hitherto.  From this darkness anything might come to them, angel or devil, nymph or satyr.  So, at least, he dreamed for a while, giving his imagination the rein.  Then, in a revulsion of feeling, he jeered at his folly, mutely scolded his nerves for spurring him to such flagrant imbecilities.

“This is all nonsense,” he told himself, “all fancy, all a world created, peopled, endowed with life by my desirous mind, which longs for a new sensation.  I will not encourage this absurdity.  I will be calm, cold, observant, discriminating.  This is the same darkness in which every night I sleep, with no sense of being surrounded by forms which I cannot see, pressed upon by the denizens of some other sphere, not that in which I breathe and live.”

He deliberately detached himself from his mood of keen expectation, and ardently resolved to anticipate nothing.  And at this moment the table began to shift along the carpet, to twist under their hands, to rap, to tremble, and to pulsate, as if breath had entered into it.  Like some live animal it stirred beneath their pressing fingers.

“It is beginning,” Julian whispered.

“Animal magnetism,” Valentine murmured.

“Yes, of course,” Julian replied.  “Shall I ask—­”

“Hush!” Valentine interrupted.

Julian was silent.

For some time the table continued its stereotyped performances.  Then it tremblingly ceased, and stood, mere dead furniture of every day, wood on which lay the four hands made deliberately limp.  A long period of unpopulated silence ensued, and through that silence, very gradually, came again to Valentine a growing sense of anxiety.  At first he fought against it as most men, perhaps out of self-respect, fight against the entrance of fear into their souls.  Then he yielded to it, and let it crawl over him, as the sea crawls over flat sands.  And the sea left no inch of sand uncovered.  Every cranny of Valentine’s soul was flooded.  There was no part of it which did not shudder with apprehension.  And outwards flowed this invisible, unmurmuring tide,