’None of your lies for me.—­Tell me why, at the sight of the thing on that sheet of paper, Paul Lessingham went green and yellow.’

‘Ask him, my lord.’

’Probably, later on, that is what I shall do.  In the meantime, I am asking you.  Answer,—­or look out for squalls.’

The electrical exhibition was going on.  He was glaring at it as if he wished that it would stop.  As if ashamed of his cowardice, plainly, on a sudden, he made a desperate effort to get the better of his fears,—­and succeeded better than I had expected or desired.  He drew himself up with what, in him, amounted to an air of dignity.

‘I am a child of Isis!’

It struck me that he made this remark, not so much to impress me, as with a view of elevating his own low spirits,

’Are you?—­Then, in that case, I regret that I am unable to congratulate the lady on her offspring.’

When I said that, a ring came into his voice which I had not heard before.

’Silence!—­You know not of what you speak!—­I warn you, as I warned Paul Lessingham, be careful not to go too far.  Be not like him,—­heed my warning.’

‘What is it I am being warned against,—­the beetle?’

‘Yes,—­the beetle!’

Were I upon oath, and this statement being made, in the presence of witnesses, say, in a solicitor’s office, I standing in fear of pains and penalties, I think that, at this point, I should leave the paper blank.  No man likes to own himself a fool, or that he ever was a fool,—­and ever since I have been wondering whether, on that occasion, that ‘child of Isis’ did, or did not, play the fool with me.  His performance was realistic enough at the time, heaven knows.  But, as it gets farther and farther away, I ask myself, more and more confidently, as time effluxes, whether, after all, it was not clever juggling,—­superhumanly clever juggling, if you will; that, and nothing more.  If it was something more, then, with a vengeance! there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in our philosophy.  The mere possibility opens vistas which the sane mind fears to contemplate.

Since, then, I am not on oath, and, should I fall short of verbal accuracy, I do not need to fear the engines of the law, what seemed to happen was this.

He was standing within about ten feet of where I leaned against the edge of the table.  The light was full on, so that it was difficult to suppose that I could make a mistake as to what took place in front of me.  As he replied to my mocking allusion to the beetle by echoing my own words, he vanished,—­or, rather, I saw him taking a different shape before my eyes.  His loose draperies all fell off him, and, as they were in the very act of falling, there issued, or there seemed to issue out of them, a monstrous creature of the beetle type,—­the man himself was gone.  On the point of size I wish to make myself clear.  My impression, when I saw it first,