say her prayers.  The bright light of the lamp fell full upon her, and Clarke watched changes fleeting over her face as the changes of the hills when the summer clouds float across the sun.  And then she lay all white and still, and the doctor turned up one of her eyelids.  She was quite unconscious.  Raymond pressed hard on one of the levers and the chair instantly sank back.  Clarke saw him cutting away a circle, like a tonsure, from her hair, and the lamp was moved nearer.  Raymond took a small glittering instrument from a little case, and Clarke turned away shudderingly.  When he looked again the doctor was binding up the wound he had made.

“She will awake in five minutes.”  Raymond was still perfectly cool.  “There is nothing more to be done; we can only wait.”

The minutes passed slowly; they could hear a slow, heavy, ticking.  There was an old clock in the passage.  Clarke felt sick and faint; his knees shook beneath him, he could hardly stand.

Suddenly, as they watched, they heard a long-drawn sigh, and suddenly did the colour that had vanished return to the girl’s cheeks, and suddenly her eyes opened.  Clarke quailed before them.  They shone with an awful light, looking far away, and a great wonder fell upon her face, and her hands stretched out as if to touch what was invisible; but in an instant the wonder faded, and gave place to the most awful terror.  The muscles of her face were hideously convulsed, she shook from head to foot; the soul seemed struggling and shuddering within the house of flesh.  It was a horrible sight, and Clarke rushed forward, as she fell shrieking to the floor.

Three days later Raymond took Clarke to Mary’s bedside.  She was lying wide-awake, rolling her head from side to side, and grinning vacantly.

“Yes,” said the doctor, still quite cool, “it is a great pity; she is a hopeless idiot.  However, it could not be helped; and, after all, she has seen the Great God Pan.”

II

MR. CLARKE’S MEMOIRS

Mr. Clarke, the gentleman chosen by Dr. Raymond to witness the strange experiment of the god Pan, was a person in whose character caution and curiosity were oddly mingled; in his sober moments he thought of the unusual and eccentric with undisguised aversion, and yet, deep in his heart, there was a wide-eyed inquisitiveness with respect to all the more recondite and esoteric elements in the nature of men.  The latter tendency had prevailed when he accepted Raymond’s invitation, for though his considered judgment had always repudiated the doctor’s theories as the wildest nonsense, yet he secretly hugged a belief in fantasy, and would have rejoiced to see that belief confirmed.  The horrors that he witnessed in the dreary laboratory were to a certain extent salutary; he was conscious of being involved in an affair not altogether reputable, and for many years afterwards