had depressed him terribly. He had been told it would be
a 'lark'; he had come expecting it to be a 'lark,' and here it was,
nothing but another failure added to his record! He proclaimed himself
an utter out-and-out failure. He said, and I can quite believe it, that
he had never tried to do anything all his life that he hadn't made a
perfect mess of--and through all the wastes of eternity he never
would. If he had had sympathy, perhaps--. He paused at that, and stood
regarding me. He remarked that, strange as it might seem to me, nobody,
not any one, ever, had given him the amount of sympathy I was doing now.
I could see what he wanted straight away, and I determined to head him
off at once. I may be a brute, you know, but being the Only Real Friend,
the recipient of the confidences of one of these egotistical weaklings,
ghost or body, is beyond my physical endurance. I got up briskly. 'Don't
you brood on these things too much,' I said. 'The thing you've got to do
is to get out of this get out of this--sharp. You pull yourself together
and TRY.' 'I can't,' he said. 'You try,' I said, and try he did."

"Try!" said Sanderson. "HOW?"

"Passes," said Clayton.

"Passes?"

"Complicated series of gestures and passes with the hands. That's how
he had come in and that's how he had to get out again. Lord! what a
business I had!"

"But how could ANY series of passes--?" I began.

"My dear man," said Clayton, turning on me and putting a great emphasis
on certain words, "you want EVERYTHING clear. _I_ don't know HOW. All
I know is that you DO--that HE did, anyhow, at least. After a fearful
time, you know, he got his passes right and suddenly disappeared."

"Did you," said Sanderson, slowly, "observe the passes?"

"Yes," said Clayton, and seemed to think. "It was tremendously queer,"
he said. "There we were, I and this thin vague ghost, in that silent
room, in this silent, empty inn, in this silent little Friday-night
town. Not a sound except our voices and a faint panting he made when
he swung. There was the bedroom candle, and one candle on the
dressing-table alight, that was all--sometimes one or other would flare
up into a tall, lean, astonished flame for a space. And queer things
happened. 'I can't,' he said; 'I shall never--!' And suddenly he sat
down on a little chair at the foot of the bed and began to sob and sob.
Lord! what a harrowing, whimpering thing he seemed!

"'You pull yourself together,' I said, and trie