“A face you would recognise again?”

Pender laughed dreadfully.

“I wish I could forget it,” he whispered, “I only wish I could forget it!” Then he sat forward in his chair suddenly, and grasped the doctor’s hand with an emotional gesture.

“I must tell you how grateful I am for your patience and sympathy,” he cried, with a tremor in his voice, “and—­that you do not think me mad.  I have told no one else a quarter of all this, and the mere freedom of speech—­the relief of sharing my affliction with another—­has helped me already more than I can possibly say.”

Dr. Silence pressed his hand and looked steadily into the frightened eyes.  His voice was very gentle when he replied.

“Your case, you know, is very singular, but of absorbing interest to me,” he said, “for it threatens, not your physical existence but the temple of your psychical existence—­the inner life.  Your mind would not be permanently affected here and now, in this world; but in the existence after the body is left behind, you might wake up with your spirit so twisted, so distorted, so befouled, that you would be spiritually insane—­a far more radical condition than merely being insane here.”

There came a strange hush over the room, and between the two men sitting there facing one another.

“Do you really mean—­Good Lord!” stammered the author as soon as he could find his tongue.

“What I mean in detail will keep till a little later, and I need only say now that I should not have spoken in this way unless I were quite positive of being able to help you.  Oh, there’s no doubt as to that, believe me.  In the first place, I am very familiar with the workings of this extraordinary drug, this drug which has had the chance effect of opening you up to the forces of another region; and, in the second, I have a firm belief in the reality of supersensuous occurrences as well as considerable knowledge of psychic processes acquired by long and painful experiment.  The rest is, or should be, merely sympathetic treatment and practical application.  The hashish has partially opened another world to you by increasing your rate of psychical vibration, and thus rendering you abnormally sensitive.  Ancient forces attached to this house have attacked you.  For the moment I am only puzzled as to their precise nature; for were they of an ordinary character, I should myself be psychic enough to feel them.  Yet I am conscious of feeling nothing as yet.  But now, please continue, Mr. Pender, and tell me the rest of your wonderful story; and when you have finished, I will talk about the means of cure.”

Pender shifted his chair a little closer to the friendly doctor and then went on in the same nervous voice with his narrative.

“After making some notes of my impressions I finally got upstairs again to bed.  It was four o’clock in the morning.  I laughed all the way up—­at the grotesque banisters, the droll physiognomy of the staircase window, the burlesque grouping of the furniture, and the memory of that outrageous footstool in the room below; but nothing more happened to alarm or disturb me, and I woke late in the morning after a dreamless sleep, none the worse for my experiment except for a slight headache and a coldness of the extremities due to lowered circulation.”