Part 2, Chapter 27, 28, 29 and 30 Summary

Nicholas returns yet again to Conchis' home expecting some acknowledgement of his having seen the mysterious woman and surprised the acknowledgement does not occur. He's also surprised to see that the reading material in his room has changed - it now contains even more sexually explicit material, and also a book describing a masque, a kind of open-air improvised performance. He immediately concludes that everything happening to him at Bourani is part of such a performance and resolves to play along with Conchis in order to find out as much as possible about his still-enigmatic host. When Nicholas joins Conchis for dinner, their conversation turns briefly to an experiment Conchis intends to conduct the following evening, an experiment that Nicholas suggests might have something to do with psychic communication. Conchis tells him nothing more on the subject, but then...