He knew it at once.  The man, he saw, was sitting well back into the corner, with a thick overcoat buttoned tightly up to the chin.  His skin was very white, and a heavy black beard grew far up over his cheeks.  At first the secretary took him for a stranger, but when he looked up and their eyes met, a sense of familiarity flashed across him, and for a second or two Jones imagined he was staring at a man he had known years before.  For, barring the beard, it was the face of an elderly clerk who had occupied the next desk to his own when he first entered the service of the insurance company, and had shown him the most painstaking kindness and sympathy in the early difficulties of his work.  But a moment later the illusion passed, for he remembered that Thorpe had been dead at least five years.  The similarity of the eyes was obviously a mere suggestive trick of memory.

The two men stared at one another for several seconds, and then Jones began to act instinctively, and because he had to.  He crossed over and took the vacant seat at the other’s table, facing him; for he felt it was somehow imperative to explain why he was late, and how it was he had almost forgotten the engagement altogether.

No honest excuse, however, came to his assistance, though his mind had begun to work furiously.

“Yes, you are late,” said the man quietly, before he could find a single word to utter.  “But it doesn’t matter.  Also, you had forgotten the appointment, but that makes no difference either.”

“I knew—­that there was an engagement,” Jones stammered, passing his hand over his forehead; “but somehow—­”

“You will recall it presently,” continued the other in a gentle voice, and smiling a little.  “It was in deep sleep last night we arranged this, and the unpleasant occurrences of to-day have for the moment obliterated it.”

A faint memory stirred within him as the man spoke, and a grove of trees with moving forms hovered before his eyes and then vanished again, while for an instant the stranger seemed to be capable of self-distortion and to have assumed vast proportions, with wonderful flaming eyes.

“Oh!” he gasped.  “It was there—­in the other region?”

“Of course,” said the other, with a smile that illumined his whole face.  “You will remember presently, all in good time, and meanwhile you have no cause to feel afraid.”

There was a wonderful soothing quality in the man’s voice, like the whispering of a great wind, and the clerk felt calmer at once.  They sat a little while longer, but he could not remember that they talked much or ate anything.  He only recalled afterwards that the head waiter came up and whispered something in his ear, and that he glanced round and saw the other people were looking at him curiously, some of them laughing, and that his companion then got up and led the way out of the restaurant.

They walked hurriedly through the streets, neither of them speaking; and Jones was so intent upon getting back the whole history of the affair from the region of deep sleep, that he barely noticed the way they took.  Yet it was clear he knew where they were bound for just as well as his companion, for he crossed the streets often ahead of him, diving down alleys without hesitation, and the other followed always without correction.