n," I continued, with painful
candour, for I longed to see the pictures he had spoken of, "group
themselves into globes and round balls of fire, and the lines that flash
about sometimes look like triangles and crosses--almost like geometrical
figures. Nothing more."

I opened my eyes again, and gave him back the letter.

"It makes my head hot," I said, feeling somehow unworthy for not seeing
anything of interest. But the look in his eyes arrested my attention at
once.

"That sensation of heat is important," he said significantly.

"It was certainly real, and rather uncomfortable," I replied, hoping he
would expand and explain. "There was a distinct feeling of
warmth--internal warmth somewhere--oppressive in a sense."

"That is interesting," he remarked, putting the letter back in his
pocket, and settling himself in the corner with newspapers and books. He
vouchsafed nothing more, and I knew the uselessness of trying to make
him talk. Following his example I settled likewise with magazines into
my corner. But when I closed my eyes again to look for the flashing
lights and the sensation of heat, I found nothing but the usual
phantasmagoria of the day's events--faces, scenes, memories,--and in due
course I fell asleep and then saw nothing at all of any kind.

When we left the train, after six hours' travelling, at a little
wayside station standing without trees in a world of sand and heather,
the late October shadows had already dropped their sombre veil upon the
landscape, and the sun dipped almost out of sight behind the moorland
hills. In a high dogcart, behind a fast horse, we were soon rattling
across the undulating stretches of an open and bleak country, the keen
air stinging our cheeks and the scents of pine and bracken strong about
us. Bare hills were faintly visible against the horizon, and the
coachman pointed to a bank of distant shadows on our left where he told
us the sea lay. Occasional stone farmhouses, standing back from the road
among straggling fir trees, and large black barns that seemed to shift
past us with a movement of their own in the gloom, were the only signs
of humanity and civilisation that we saw, until at the end of a bracing
five miles the lights of the lodge gates flared before us and we plunged
into a thick grove of pine trees that concealed the Manor House up to
the moment of actual arrival.

Colonel Wragge himself met us in the hall. He was the typical army
officer who had seen se