It was lucky it had a metal receiver, or the whole place would have been in a blaze.  Mr. Cox was the first to speak, and his remark, shorn of needless excrescences, was to the effect that Fotheringay was a fool.  Fotheringay was beyond disputing even so fundamental a proposition as that!  He was astonished beyond measure at the thing that had occurred.  The subsequent conversation threw absolutely no light on the matter so far as Fotheringay was concerned; the general opinion not only followed Mr. Cox very closely but very vehemently.  Everyone accused Fotheringay of a silly trick, and presented him to himself as a foolish destroyer of comfort and security.  His mind was in a tornado of perplexity, he was himself inclined to agree with them, and he made a remarkably ineffectual opposition to the proposal of his departure.

He went home flushed and heated, coat-collar crumpled, eyes smarting, and ears red.  He watched each of the ten street lamps nervously as he passed it.  It was only when he found himself alone in his little bedroom in Church Row that he was able to grapple seriously with his memories of the occurrence, and ask, “What on earth happened?”

He had removed his coat and boots, and was sitting on the bed with his hands in his pockets repeating the text of his defence for the seventeenth time, “I didn’t want the confounded thing to upset,” when it occurred to him that at the precise moment he had said the commanding words he had inadvertently willed the thing he said, and that when he had seen the lamp in the air he had felt that it depended on him to maintain it there without being clear how this was to be done.  He had not a particularly complex mind, or he might have stuck for a time at that “inadvertently willed,” embracing, as it does, the abstrusest problems of voluntary action; but as it was, the idea came to him with a quite acceptable haziness.  And from that, following, as I must admit, no clear logical path, he came to the test of experiment.

He pointed resolutely to his candle and collected his mind, though he felt he did a foolish thing.  “Be raised up,” he said.  But in a second that feeling vanished.  The candle was raised, hung in the air one giddy moment, and as Mr. Fotheringay gasped, fell with a smash on his toilet-table, leaving him in darkness save for the expiring glow of its wick.

For a time Mr. Fotheringay sat in the darkness, perfectly still.  “It did happen, after all,” he said.  “And ’ow I’m to explain it I don’t know.”  He sighed heavily, and began feeling in his pockets for a match.  He could find none, and he rose and groped about the toilet-table.  “I wish I had a match,” he said.  He resorted to his coat, and there was none there, and then it dawned upon him that miracles were possible even with matches.  He extended a hand and scowled at it in the dark.  “Let there be a match in that hand,” he said.  He felt some light object fall across his palm and his fingers closed upon a match.