The word was enough; Carrick stopped laughing, and walked away toward his desk.  Mr. Newman, standing by the big arm-chair from which he had just risen, looked after him with a sudden liveliness growing in his face.  The experience through which he had just come, abiding with him as so secure a memory, precluded the doubts he might otherwise have felt; Carrick’s words and his excitement, so unusual in him, and the clear, unquestionable sense of recollection with which he summoned again to his mind the white dusty road, the swaying body of the hanged man, the drum of the hoofs of the coach-horses-these stormed his reason and forced conviction on him.

“The siege of Troy, you said?” he asked, with a nervous titter.  The thing was gripping him.

Carrick had seated himself at his desk, as though to steady himself by the sight of its prosaic litter.  He looked up now, his face composed and usual in the light of the reading lamp.

“Or anywhere,” he said shortly.  He nodded two or three times impressively; he was master of himself again.  “It’s true, Newman; I can do it; I’ve opened the door.  We must have a few more tests and verify the method by trying it on another subject.  Then we’ll go to war with the professors.”

“Ye-es,” agreed Mr. Newman absently.  “Anywhere, you said?  You can open my eyes at any period in time?  You can do that, Carrick?”

“Well,” began Carrick, and paused.  “Why?” he demanded.  “What have you got in your mind?”

Mr. Newman came slowly down toward him till he leaned across the top of the desk facing the younger man.  He was smiling still, but a fire had lit in his eyes, something adventurous and strong looked out through them.  The elderly stout man was braced and exalted like a martyr going to the stake.

“Can you?” he repeated.  “Can you, Carrick?  Say—­can you do that?”

“Unless——­” hesitated the other, staring at him.  “But—­you must have been somewhere, at any time.  Yes, I can do it.”

Mr. Newman’s eyes looked over his head and beyond him.

“Then,” he said, and a deep note reverberated in his even voice—­ “then show me the day on which Christ died!”

He continued to look past Carrick at the shadowy end of the room, still smiling his strange and uplifted smile.

Carrick moved in his chair, with a half-gesture as of irritation.

“Look here,” he said.  “Pull yourself together, Newman.  There are limits, you know, after all.”

Two days elapsed before the evening on which the attempt was to be made; Carrick, alleging difficulties and dangers with long scientific names, had refused to try it earlier.  He had been unwilling to try it at all.

“I don’t want to mix up a matter of clear science with your religious emotions,” he had declared.  “And I’ve got a certain amount of religion of my own, for that matter.  I manage to believe in it without corroboration; what’s the matter with yours, that you can’t do the same?”