But it was not corroboration which Mr. Newman desired.  He had not so much argued as insisted; and it had been difficult to reason with his manner of one buoyed up, exalted, inspired.  He had had his way, on the sole condition that he should wait two days—­“and give sanity a chance,” Carrick had added.

But on the stroke of nine, on the appointed evening, he was standing within the door of Carrick’s study, his hat in his hand, a white silk muffler about his neck, instead of a collar.

“I was very careful to eat very little at dinner,” were his first words.

Carrick, who had been looking forward to his arrival with nervous dread, glanced up sharply with an affectation of annoyance at an interruption.

“More fool you,” he barked, in his harshest voice.  Mr. Newman smiled, and laid his hat down on the table and began to unwind his muffler.

Carrick frowned at him.  “I’m rather busy to-night, Newman,” he said.  That had no effect.  He rose.  “Besides, something has occurred to me, and—­it is not safe, you know.”

Mr. Newman laid his muffler beside his hat; without it he had a curiously incomplete and undressed appearance.  He turned round.

“Oh yes, it is,” he contradicted mildly.  “As safe as it was on Monday, at any rate!”

“Ah!” Carrick caught him up eagerly.  “But that wasn’t safe, either.  I hadn’t thought of this then.  You see, we don’t understand yet how the thing applies.  What is it that becomes conscious in the period you see?  Is it you, in an earlier incarnation?  If so, supposing I—­I let go of you at a time when you were dead!  What happens then?  Do I get you back—­or what?”

He tried to make the consideration graphic, driving it at Mr. Newman’s serenity with a knit brow and a moving forefinger.

Mr. Newman shook his head.  “I don’t know,” he answered, unmoved by Carrick’s fervor.  “I can’t tell you that.  But—­you leave me where you found me—­in the hands of my God.”

With the same quiet cheerfulness, he crossed to the big chair, turned it to face the wall, and sat down in it.  “I’m quite ready,” he said.

Carrick was still standing by the table.  He was frowning heavily; the proceeding was utterly against his inclination.  When Mr. Newman spoke, he sighed windily, a sigh of resignation, of defeat.

“I warned you,” he said, and wiped the palms of his hands on his trousers for what he had to do.

A less honest man than Carrick, finding himself in the like predicament, might plausibly have contrived a failure.  Nothing easier than to tell Mr. Newman that nerves, a mental burden, or what not, stood in the way of the adventure.  Mr. Carrick got to work forthwith.

Mr. Newman, supine in his chair, knew the preliminary stages of the process well.  They took longer than usual to-night; both of them were unkeyed and had to compose themselves to the affair.  But at last the visible world, the wall before him, commenced to dislimn; it shifted; it became mist, writhing and tinged with faint colors, that submerged his will and his consciousness, till they sank, gathering impetus, into a void below—­the vacancy of the spirit that looses its hold on the body and is rudderless.  He knew the blackness which is death, the momentary throe of entering it, the shock, the sense of chill, the dumbness.