“For God’s sake then—­the light!”

Valentine felt for it, but his hand shook and did not find the button.

“Make haste, Val.  What are you doing?  Ah!”

The room sprang into view, and Julian’s eyes, with a furious, sick eagerness, sought his hands.

“Valentine,” he exclaimed hoarsely, “I see nothing, but I’ve got hold of the hand still.  I’ve got it tight.  Put your hand here—­that’s it—­under mine.  Now d’you feel the thing?”

Julian’s hand, contracted as if grasping another, was in the air, about an inch, or an inch and a half, above the surface of the table.  Valentine obediently thrust his hand beneath it.  He now shook his head.

“I feel nothing,” he said.  “There is nothing.”

“Then am I mad?” said Julian.  “I’m holding flesh and blood.  I’ll swear that.  Yes, I can feel the fingers twitching, the muscles, the bones.  I can even trace the veins.  What does this mean?”

“I can’t tell.”

“You look very strange, Valentine.  You are certain you see and feel nothing?”

“Nothing whatever,” Valentine forced himself to answer calmly.

“We’ll see this through,” said Julian with a sort of angry determination.  “I won’t be frightened by a hand.  We’ll see it through.  Out with the light.”

Valentine turned it off.  The action was purely mechanical.  He had to perform it, whether he would or no.

“Don’t speak,” he whispered to Julian in the darkness.  “Don’t speak, whatever happens, till I ask you to speak.”

“Why?”

“Don’t; don’t!”

“All right.”

They sat still.

And now the horror that had possessed Valentine so utterly began to fade away, making its exit from his body and soul with infinitesimally small steps.  At length it had quite gone, and its place was taken by a numb calm, level and still at first, then curiously definite, almost too definite to be calm at all.  Gradually this calm withdrew into exhaustion, an exhaustion such as dwells incessantly with the anemic, with those whose hearts beat feebly and whose vitality flickers low to fading.  That was like a delicious arrival of death, of death delicate and serene, ivory white and pure, death desirable, grateful.  Valentine indeed believed that he was dying, there in the darkness beside his friend, and, impersonally as it seemed, something of him, his brain perhaps, seemed to be floating high up, as a bird floats over the sea, and listening, and noting all that he did in this crisis.  This attentive spirit heard a strange movement of his soul in its bodily prison, heard his soul stir, as if waking out of sleep, heard it shift, and rise up slowly, noted its pause of hesitation.  Then, as the vitality of the body ebbed lower, there grew in the soul an excitement that aspired like a leaping flame.  It was as if a madman, prisoned in his narrow cell in a vast asylum, secluded with his company of phantoms, heard the crackling of the fire that