slowly mottled with purplish
stains.

"Years of friendship," he stumbled, thick-voiced, through broken
phrases. "Wouldn't take that from any one else.... Not yourself....
Question of viewpoint, really.... I'd be the last to blame either of
you, if---- However----"

"Maltby," I said, "you're what I never thought you--a common or garden
cad. That's my deliberate opinion. I've nothing more to say to you."

For an instant I supposed he was going to strike me. It is one of the
major disappointments of my life that he did not. My fingers ached for
his throat.

Later, with the undertaker efficiently in charge of all practical
arrangements, and while Susan still hid from us behind her mysterious
veil, I talked things out with Doctor Askew, giving him the whole story
of Susan as clearly and unreservedly as I could. My purpose in doing so
was two-fold. I felt that he must know as much as possible about Susan
before she woke again to what we call reality. What I feared was that
this shock--which had so profoundly and so peculiarly affected
her--might, even after the long and lengthening trance had passed, leave
some mark upon her spirit, perhaps even some permanent cloud upon her
brain. I had read enough of these matters to know that my fear was not
groundless, and I could see that Doctor Askew welcomed my
information--felt as keenly as I did that he might later be called upon
to interpret and deal with some perplexing borderland condition of the
mind. It was as well at least to be prepared. That was my major purpose.
But connected with it was another, more self-regarding. My own vision,
my psychic reel, greatly disturbed me. It was not orthodox. It could not
be explained, for example, as something swiftly fabricated from covert
memories by my unconscious mind, and forced then sharply into
consciousness by some freak of circumstance, some psychic perturbation
or strain.

My vision of the accident itself--of the manner of its occurrence--might
conceivably have been such a fabrication, subconsciously elaborated from
the facts given me by Conlon; not so my vision of its setting. I had
seen in vivid detail the interior of a room which I had never entered
and had never heard described; and every detail thus seen was minutely
accurate, for I had since examined the room and had found nothing in it
unfamiliar, nothing that did not correspond with what my mind's eye had
already noted and remembered. Take merely one instance--the patt