a minute and then gradually withdrew my hands and
gazed at the carpet. I dared not look up yet. The pattern of the carpet
glowed in colours more brilliant than I had ever seen before. As I
knelt there, in attitude of prayer, it seemed to me that I had never
noticed colour before; that all my life had been passed without any
consciousness of colour. At last I lifted my sight from the miracle of
the carpet to the miracle of the day. High overhead, through the dingy
windowpane, was a patch of clear sky, infinitely sweet, remote and
inaccessible, framed by golden clouds. As I gazed at it an indescribable
reverence and joy filled my mind. In the purity of the morning light, it
seemed the most lovely and wonderful thing I had ever beheld. And I,
Richard Harden, consulting physician who had hitherto looked on life
through a microscope, remained kneeling on my miraculous carpet, gazing
upwards at the miraculous heavens. Acting on some strange impulse I
stretched out my hands, and then I saw something which turned me into a
rigid statue.

It was in this attitude that Sarakoff found me.

He entered my room violently. His hair was tousled and his beard stuck
out at a grotesque angle. He was clad in pink pyjamas, and in his hand
he carried a silver-backed mirror. My attitude did not seem to cause him
any surprise. The door slammed behind him, with a noise of thunder, and
he rushed across the room to where I knelt, and stooping, examined my
finger nails at which I was staring.

"Good!" he shouted. "Good! Harden, you've got it too!"

He pointed triumphantly. Under the nails there was a faint tinge of
blue, and at the nail-bed this was already intense, forming little
crescent-shaped areas of vivid turquoise.

Sarakoff sat down on the edge of my bed and studied himself attentively
in the hand mirror.

"A slight pallor is perceptible in the skin," he announced as if he was
dictating a note for a medical journal, "and this is due, no doubt, to a
deposit of the blue pigment in the deeper layers of the epidermis. The
hair is at present unaffected save at the roots. God knows what colour
blond hair will become. I am anxious about Leonora. The expression--I
suppose I can regard myself as a typical case, Harden--is serene, if not
animated. Subjectively, one may observe a great sense of exhilaration
coupled with an extraordinary increase in the power of perception. You,
for example, look to me quite different."

"In what way?" I demand