But Strickland did not answer.  He caught hold of the back of a chair, and, without warning, went into an amazing fit of hysterics.  It is terrible to see a strong man overtaken with hysteria.  Then it struck me that we had fought for Fleete’s soul with the Silver Man in that room, and had disgraced ourselves as Englishmen for ever, and I laughed and gasped and gurgled just as shamefully as Strickland, while Fleete thought that we had both gone mad.  We never told him what we had done.

Some years later, when Strickland had married and was a church-going member of society for his wife’s sake, we reviewed the incident dispassionately, and Strickland suggested that I should put it before the public.

I cannot myself see that this step is likely to clear up the mystery; because, in the first place, no one will believe a rather unpleasant story, and, in the second, it is well known to every right-minded man that the gods of the heathen are stone and brass, and any attempt to deal with them otherwise is justly condemned.

THE RETURN OF IMRAY

The doors were wide, the story saith,
Out of the night came the patient wraith,
He might not speak, and he could not stir
A hair of the Baron’s minniver—–­
Speechless and strengthless, a shadow thin,
He roved the castle to seek his kin. 
And oh,’twas a piteous thing to see
The dumb ghost follow his enemy! 

                                                        The Baron.

Imray achieved the impossible.  Without warning, for no conceivable motive, in his youth, at the threshold of his career he chose to disappear from the world—–­which is to say, the little Indian station where he lived.

Upon a day he was alive, well, happy, and in great evidence among the billiard-tables at his Club.  Upon a morning, he was not, and no manner of search could make sure where he might be.  He had stepped out of his place; he had not appeared at his office at the proper time, and his dogcart was not upon the public roads.  For these reasons, and because he was hampering, in a microscopical degree, the administration of the Indian Empire, that Empire paused for one microscopical moment to make inquiry into the fate of Imray.  Ponds were dragged, wells were plumbed, telegrams were despatched down the lines of railways and to the nearest seaport town-twelve hundred miles away; but Imray was not at the end of the drag-ropes nor the telegraph wires.  He was gone, and his place knew him no more.

Then the work of the great Indian Empire swept forward, because it could not be delayed, and Imray from being a man became a mystery—­such a thing as men talk over at their tables in the Club for a month, and then forget utterly.  His guns, horses, and carts were sold to the highest bidder.  His superior officer wrote an altogether absurd letter to his mother, saying that Imray had unaccountably disappeared, and his bungalow stood empty.