devouring his body, till the sweat was upon his face and his strained hands and trembling fingers were cold like ice, and his knees fluttered as the knees of palsied age, and his teeth clicked, row against row, and his hairs stirred, and his head, under its thatch, tingled and burned and throbbed.  Every faculty, too, seemed to stand straight up like a sentinel at its post, staring into dust clouds through which rode an approaching enemy.  Eyes watched, ears listened, brain was hideously alert.  The whole body kept itself tense, stiff, wary.  For Valentine had a secret conviction at this moment that he was about to be attacked.  By what?  He was hardly master of himself enough to wonder.  His thoughts no longer ran free.  They crept like paralyzed things about his mind, and that despite the unnatural vitality of his brain.  It was as if he thought intensely, violently, and yet could not think at all, as a man terrified may stare with wide open eyes and yet perceive nothing, lacking for a moment the faculty of perceiving.  So Valentine waited, like some blind man with glaring eyeballs.  And then, passing into another stage of sensation, he found himself vehemently and rapidly discussing possibilities of terror, forming mental pictures of all the things, of all the powers, that we cannot see.  He embodied, materialized, the wind, the voice of the sea, the angry, hot scent of certain flowers, of the white lily, the tuberose, the hyacinth.  He created figures for light, for darkness, for a wail, for a laugh, and set them in array all around him in the blackness.  But none of these imagined figures could cause the horror which he felt.  He drove away the whole pack of them with a silent cry, a motionless dismissing wave of his hands.  But there might be other beings round us, condemned to eternal invisibility lest the sight of them should drive men mad.  We cannot see them, he thought.  As a rule, we have no sensation of these gaunt neighbours, no suspicion of their approach, of their companionship.  We do not hear their footsteps.  We are utterly unconscious of them.  Yet may there not be physical or mental paroxysms, during which we become conscious of them, during which we know, beyond all power of doubt, that they are near us, with us?  And, in such paroxysms, is it not possible for them to break through the intangible and yet all-powerful barriers that divide them from us, and to touch us, caress us, attack us?  Valentine believed that he was immersed in such a paroxysm, and that the barriers were in process of being broken down.  He seemed actually to hear the faint cry of an approaching being, the dim uproar of its violent efforts to obtain its sinister will, and gain the power to make itself known to him by some ghastly and malignant deed.  He was unutterably afraid.

“The hand again!” Julian suddenly cried.  “Valentine, is it yours?  Why don’t you answer?  I say, is it yours?”

“No,” Valentine forced himself, with difficulty, to reply.