“By Jove!” said Annerly enthusiastically, “I believe you’ve hit it.  At any rate, let us try; we can but fail.”

That night we placed again two of my sovereigns on the table, and arranged the furniture with the same scrupulous care as before.

Still somewhat doubtful of my own psychic fitness for the work in which I was engaged, I endeavoured to keep my mind so poised as to readily offer a mark for any astral disturbance that might be about.  The result showed that it had offered just such a mark.  Our experiment succeeded completely.  The two coins had vanished in the morning.

For nearly two months we continued our experiments on these lines.  At times Annerly himself, so he told me, would leave money, often considerable sums, within reach of the phantasm, which never failed to remove them during the night.  But Annerly, being a man of strict honour, never carried on these experiments alone except when it proved impossible to communicate with me in time for me to come.

At other times he would call me up with the simple message, “Q is here,” or would send me a telegram, or a written note saying, “Q needs money; bring any that you have, but no more.”

On my own part, I was extremely anxious to bring our experiments prominently before the public, or to interest the Society for Psychic Research, and similar bodies, in the daring transit which we had effected between the world of sentience and the psycho-astric, or pseudo-ethereal existence.  It seemed to me that we alone had succeeded in thus conveying money directly and without mediation, from one world to another.  Others, indeed, had done so by the interposition of a medium, or by subscription to an occult magazine, but we had performed the feat with such simplicity that I was anxious to make our experience public, for the benefit of others like myself.

Annerly, however, was averse from this course, being fearful that it might break off our relations with Q.

It was some three months after our first inter-astral psycho-monetary experiment, that there came the culmination of my experiences—­so mysterious as to leave me still lost in perplexity.

Annerly had come in to see me one afternoon.  He looked nervous and depressed.

“I have just had a psychic communication from Q,” he said in answer to my inquiries, “which I can hardly fathom.  As far as I can judge, Q has formed some plan for interesting other phantasms in the kind of work that we are doing.  He proposes to form, on his side of the gulf, an association that is to work in harmony with us, for monetary dealings on a large scale, between the two worlds.”

My reader may well imagine that my eyes almost blazed with excitement at the magnitude of the prospect opened up.

“Q wishes us to gather together all the capital that we can, and to send it across to him, in order that he may be able to organise with him a corporate association of phanograms, or perhaps in this case, one would more correctly call them phantoids.”