“I was hot with passion,” he said, “and now she has met her reward.  They also, no doubt—­”

And behold! far away out of the wooded slopes across the valley, but in the clearness of the sunset, distinct and unmistakable, he saw a little spire of smoke.

At that his expression of serene resignation changed to an amazed anger.  Smoke?  He turned the head of the white horse about, and hesitated.  And as he did so a little rustle of air went through the grass about him.  Far away upon some reeds swayed a tattered sheet of grey.  He looked at the cobwebs; he looked at the smoke.

“Perhaps, after all, it is not them,” he said at last.

But he knew better.

After he had stared at the smoke for some time, he mounted the white horse.

As he rode, he picked his way amidst stranded masses of web.  For some reason there were many dead spiders on the ground, and those that lived feasted guiltily on their fellows.  At the sound of his horse’s hoofs they fled.

Their time had passed.  From the ground, without either a wind to carry them or a winding-sheet ready, these things, for all their poison, could do him little evil.

He flicked with his belt at those he fancied came too near.  Once, where a number ran together over a bare place, he was minded to dismount and trample them with his boots, but this impulse he overcame.  Ever and again he turned in his saddle, and looked back at the smoke.

“Spiders,” he muttered over and over again.  “Spiders.  Well, well...  The next time I must spin a web.”

  XXVII.

  THE NEW ACCELERATOR.

Certainly, if ever a man found a guinea when he was looking for a pin, it is my good friend Professor Gibberne.  I have heard before of investigators overshooting the mark, but never quite to the extent that he has done.  He has really, this time at any rate, without any touch of exaggeration in the phrase, found something to revolutionise human life.  And that when he was simply seeking an all-round nervous stimulant to bring languid people up to the stresses of these pushful days.  I have tasted the stuff now several times, and I cannot do better than describe the effect the thing had on me.  That there are astonishing experiences in store for all in search of new sensations will become apparent enough.

Professor Gibberne, as many people know, is my neighbour in Folkestone.  Unless my memory plays me a trick, his portrait at various ages has already appeared in The Strand Magazine—­think late in 1899 but I am unable to look it up because I have lent that volume to someone who has never sent it back.  The reader may, perhaps, recall the high forehead and the singularly long black eyebrows that give such a Mephistophelean touch to his face.  He occupies one of those pleasant little detached houses in the mixed style that make the western end of the Upper Sandgate Road so interesting.  His is the