sses and began meditatively to light my pipe.
I was trying to piece together these words "Philip Cardinnock--
Cicely Williams--_fui_," and to fit them into the tune that kept running
in my head.

My pipe went out. I pulled out my pouch and was filling it afresh when
a puff of wind came down the chimney and blew a cloud of blue smoke out
into the room.

The smoke curled up and spread itself over the face of the mirror
confronting me. I followed it lazily with my eyes. Then suddenly I
bent forward, staring up. Something very curious was happening to the
glass.

II.

WHAT I SAW IN THE MIRROR.

The smoke that had dimmed the mirror's face for a moment was rolling off
its surface and upwards to the ceiling. But some of it still lingered
in filmy, slowly revolving eddies. The glass itself, too, was stirring
beneath this film and running across its breadth in horizontal waves
which broke themselves silently, one after another, against the dark
frame, while the circles of smoke kept widening, as the ripples widen
when a stone is tossed into still water.

I rubbed my eyes. The motion on the mirror's surface was quickening
perceptibly, while the glass itself was steadily becoming more opaque,
the film deepening to a milky colour and lying over the surface in heavy
folds. I was about to start up and touch the glass with my hand, when
beneath this milky colour and from the heart of the whirling film, there
began to gleam an underlying brilliance after the fashion of the light
in an opal, but with this difference, that the light here was blue--
a steel blue so vivid that the pain of it forced me to shut my eyes.
When I opened them again, this light had increased in intensity.
The disturbance in the glass began to abate; the eddies revolved more
slowly; the smoke-wreaths faded: and as they died wholly out, the blue
light went out on a sudden and the mirror looked down upon me as before.

That is to say, I thought so for a moment. But the next, I found that
though its face reflected the room in which I sat, there was one
omission.

_I_ was that omission. My arm-chair was there, but no one sat in it.

I was surprised; but, as well as I can recollect, not in the least
frightened. I continued, at any rate, to gaze steadily into the glass,
and now took note of two particulars that had escaped me. The table I
saw was laid for two. Forks, knives and glasses gleamed at either end,
and a couple of decanters caug