“What did I do?” he repeated.  “Opened a door for you—­that’s all.  What did you find the other side?”

Mr. Newman passed an uncertain hand across his eyes.  The feeling with which he had returned to consciousness, that liberties had been taken with him, was leaving him as the familiar ugly room grew about him again.

“It was queer,” he said doubtfully, and Carrick bent his head in eagerness to listen.

“You’ve been hypnotised before, often enough.  What was queer?”

“Hypnotism is unconsciousness, so far as I’m concerned,” said Mr. Newman.  “But this—­wasn’t!  Not dreams, either; the thing was so absolutely real.”

“Go on,” said Carrick, as he paused to ponder.

“I felt myself going off, you know, just as usual—­the mistiness, the reposefulness, the last moment when one would rebel if one could—­but one can’t; that was all ordinary.  And then came the blank, that second of utter emptiness, as though one were alone in the wilderness of outer space, and light were not yet created.  As a rule, that ends it; one’s asleep then.  But this time I wasn’t.  It seemed—­it sort of dawned toward me——­” Mr. Newman groped for a word which eluded him, with a face that brooded heavily.

“What did?” demanded Carrick.

“It was a lightness, first of all, a thinning of the dark, that grew and broadened till it was like a thing coming at me—­like something thrown at me.  And suddenly it was all about me, and I was in it, and it was daylight—­just ordinary daylight, you know.  There was a white, flat road, with a hedge on one side and a low leaning fence on the other, and over the fence there were fields; and I was walking along by the roadside, with the thick powdery dust kicking up from under my feet as I went.”

He paused.  “Yes?” cried Carrick.  “Yes?  Yes?”

“I don’t remember what I was thinking,” said Mr. Newman.  “Perhaps I wasn’t thinking.  I saw a signpost farther along the road with something like a long bundle—­it was rather like a limp bolster, I fancy—­hanging from it.  I was staring toward it, when there came a noise behind me, like a trumpet being blown, and I turned to see a coach with four horses come tearing along toward me, with a red-coated man at the back, blowing a horn.  The roof of it was crowded with people curiously dressed; they all looked down on me as they came abreast, and their faces had a sort of strange roughness.  I saw them as clearly as all that—­a coarseness, it was—­a kind of cruel stupidity.  Several of them seemed to be pock-marked, too.  It struck me; I wondered how a coach-load of such people had been gathered together; and I might have wondered longer; but one of them laughed, a great neighing guffaw of a laugh, as the coachman swung his whip.”

Mr. Newman paused, and his hand floated to his face again.

“It cut me across here,” he said thoughtfully.  “It—­it hurt.  Awfully!”

Carrick nodded.