“Delighted to see you all right again,” said Sir Robert as he wheeled up a chair into which Mr. Haswell sank.

“I am not all right, Aylward,” he answered; “I am not all right at all.  Never had such an upset in my life; thought I was going to die when that accursed savage told his beastly tale.  Aylward, you are a man of the world, tell me, what is the meaning of the thing?  You remember what we thought we saw in the office, and then—­that story.”

“I don’t know,” he answered; “frankly I don’t know.  I am a man who has never believed in anything I cannot see and test, one who utterly lacks faith.  In my leisure I have examined into the various religious systems and found them to be rubbish.  I am convinced that we are but highly-developed mammals born by chance, and when our day is done, departing into the black nothingness out of which we came.  Everything else, that is, what is called the higher and spiritual part, I attribute to the superstitions incident to the terror of the hideous position in which we find ourselves, that of gods of a sort hemmed in by a few years of fearful and tormented life.  But you know the old arguments, so why should I enter on them?  And now I am confronted with an experience which I cannot explain.  I certainly thought that in the office on Friday evening I saw that gold mask to which I had taken so strange a fancy that I offered to give Vernon L17,000 for it because I thought that it brought us luck, swim across the floor of our room and look first into your face and then into mine.  Well, the next night that negro tells his story.  What am I to make of it?”

“Can’t tell you,” answered Mr. Champers-Haswell with a groan.  “All I know is that it nearly made a corpse of me.  I am not like you, Aylward, I was brought up as an Evangelical, and although I haven’t given much thought to these matters of late years—­well, we don’t shake them off in a hurry.  I daresay there is something somewhere, and when the black man was speaking, that something seemed uncommonly near.  It got up and gripped me by the throat, shaking the mortal breath out of me, and upon my word, Aylward, I have been wishing all the morning that I had led a different kind of life, as my old parents and my brother John, Barbara’s father, who was a very religious kind of man, did before me.”

“It is rather late to think of all that now, Haswell,” said Sir Robert, shrugging his shoulders.  “One takes one’s line and there’s an end.  Personally I believe that we are overstrained with the fearful and anxious work of this flotation, and have been the victims of an hallucination and a coincidence.  Although I confess that I came to look upon the thing as a kind of mascot, I put no trust in any fetish.  How can a bit of gold move, and how can it know the future?  Well, I have written to them to clear it out of the office to-morrow, so it won’t trouble us any more.  And now I have come to speak to you on another matter.”