ures moved about, sometimes bending over him, sometimes
retreating and melting away like shadows on a shifting screen.

Suddenly a blaze of light flashed upon him, and his eyes flew open; he
tumbled back for a moment into his normal world. He wasn't on the grass
at all, but was lying upon his own bed in the night nursery. His mother
was bending over him with a very white face, and a tall man dressed in
black stood beside her, holding some kind of shining instrument in his
fingers. A little behind them he saw Nixie, shading a lamp with her
hand. Then the white face came close over the pillow, and a voice full
of tenderness whispered, "My darling boy, don't you know me? It's
mother! No one will hurt you. Speak to me, if you can, dear."

She stretched out her hands, and Jimbo knew her and made an effort to
answer. But it seemed to him as if his whole body had suddenly become a
solid mass of iron, and he could control no part of it; his lips and his
hands both refused to move. Before he could make a sign that he had
understood and was trying to reply, a fierce flame rushed between them
and blinded him, his eyes closed, and he dropped back again into utter
darkness. The walls flew asunder and the ceiling melted into air, while
the bed sank away beneath him, down, down, down into an abyss of
shadows. The lamp in Nixie's hands dwindled into a star, and his
mother's anxious face became a tiny patch of white in the distance,
blurred out of all semblance of a human countenance. For a time the man
in black seemed to hover over the bed as it sank, as though he were
trying to follow it down; but it, too, presently joined the general
enveloping blackness and lost its outline. The pain had blotted out
everything, and the return to consciousness had been only momentary.

Not all the doctors in the world could have made things otherwise. Jimbo
was off on his travels at last--travels in which the chief incidents
were directly traceable to the causes and details of his accident: the
terror of the Empty House, the pursuit of its Inmate, the pain of the
bull's horns, and, above all, the flight through the air.

For everything in his subsequent adventures found its inspiration in the
events described, and a singular parallel ran ever between the Jimbo
upon the bed in the night-nursery and the other emancipated Jimbo
wandering in the regions of unconsciousness and delirium.

CHAPTER V

INTO THE EMPTY HOUSE

The darkness lasted