After a pause that prolonged itself into minutes, he crossed the room and unlocked a drawer in a bookcase, taking out a small book with a red cover.  It had a lock to it, and he produced a key out of his pocket and proceeded to open the covers.  The bright eyes of Mr. Mudge never left him for a single second.

“It almost seems a pity,” he said at length, “to cure you, Mr. Mudge.  You are on the way to discovery of great things.  Though you may lose your life in the process—­that is, your life here in the world of three dimensions—­you would lose thereby nothing of great value—­you will pardon my apparent rudeness, I know—­and you might gain what is infinitely greater.  Your suffering, of course, lies in the fact that you alternate between the two worlds and are never wholly in one or the other.  Also, I rather imagine, though I cannot be certain of this from any personal experiments, that you have here and there penetrated even into space of more than four dimensions, and have hence experienced the terror you speak of.”

The perspiring son of the Essex bargeman and the woman of Normandy bent his head several times in assent, but uttered no word in reply.

“Some strange psychic predisposition, dating no doubt from one of your former lives, has favoured the development of your ‘disease’; and the fact that you had no normal training at school or college, no leading by the poor intellect into the culs-de-sac falsely called knowledge, has further caused your exceedingly rapid movement along the lines of direct inner experience.  None of the knowledge you have foreshadowed has come to you through the senses, of course.”

Mr. Mudge, sitting in his immovable chair, began to tremble slightly.  A wind again seemed to pass over his surface and again to set it curiously in motion like a field of grass.

“You are merely talking to gain time,” he said hurriedly, in a shaking voice.  “This thinking aloud delays us.  I see ahead what you are coming to, only please be quick, for something is going to happen.  A band is again coming down the street, and if it plays—­if it plays Wagner—­I shall be off in a twinkling.”

“Precisely.  I will be quick.  I was leading up to the point of how to effect your cure.  The way is this:  You must simply learn to block the entrances.”

“True, true, utterly true!” exclaimed the little man, dodging about nervously in the depths of the chair.  “But how, in the name of space, is that to be done?”

“By concentration.  They are all within you, these entrances, although outer cases such as colour, music and other things lead you towards them.  These external things you cannot hope to destroy, but once the entrances are blocked, they will lead you only to bricked walls and closed channels.  You will no longer be able to find the way.”

“Quick, quick!” cried the bobbing figure in the chair.  “How is this concentration to be effected?”