Mr. Maydig looked serious.  “I see you are in a tangle.  Yes, it’s a difficult position.  How you are to end it...”  He became diffuse and inconclusive.

“However, we’ll leave Winch for a little and discuss the larger question.  I don’t think this is a case of the black art or anything of the sort.  I don’t think there is any taint of criminality about it at all, Mr. Fotheringay—­none whatever, unless you are suppressing material facts.  No, it’s miracles—­pure miracles—­miracles, if I may say so, of the very highest class.”

He began to pace the hearthrug and gesticulate, while Mr. Fotheringay sat with his arm on the table and his head on his arm, looking worried.  “I don’t see how I’m to manage about Winch,” he said.

“A gift of working miracles—­apparently a very powerful gift,” said Mr. Maydig, “will find a way about Winch—­never fear.  My dear sir, you are a most important man—­a man of the most astonishing possibilities.  As evidence, for example!  And in other ways, the things you may do...”

“Yes, I’ve thought of a thing or two,” said Mr. Fotheringay.  “But—­ some of the things came a bit twisty.  You saw that fish at first?  Wrong sort of bowl and wrong sort of fish.  And I thought I’d ask someone.”

“A proper course,” said Mr. Maydig, “a very proper course—­altogether the proper course.”  He stopped and looked at Mr. Fotheringay.  “It’s practically an unlimited gift.  Let us test your powers, for instance.  If they really are ...  If they really are all they seem to be.”

And so, incredible as it may seem, in the study of the little house behind the Congregational Chapel, on the evening of Sunday, Nov. 10, 1896, Mr. Fotheringay, egged on and inspired by Mr. Maydig, began to work miracles.  The reader’s attention is specially and definitely called to the date.  He will object, probably has already objected, that certain points in this story are improbable, that if any things of the sort already described had indeed occurred, they would have been in all the papers at that time.  The details immediately following he will find particularly hard to accept, because among other things they involve the conclusion that he or she, the reader in question, must have been killed in a violent and unprecedented manner more than a year ago.  Now a miracle is nothing if not improbable, and as a matter of fact the reader was killed in a violent and unprecedented manner in 1896.  In the subsequent course of this story that will become perfectly clear and credible, as every right-minded and reasonable reader will admit.  But this is not the place for the end of the story, being but little beyond the hither side of the middle.  And at first the miracles worked by Mr. Fotheringay were timid little miracles—­little things with the cups and parlour fitments, as feeble as the miracles of Theosophists, and, feeble as they were, they were received with awe by his collaborator.