bad ankle, looked about for a walking stick.
He found one, and I saw Hawkins take a swift step forward, and then
stop, with no expression whatever in his face.

"This will answer, Hawkins."

"Yes, sir," said Hawkins impassively.

And if I realize that Sperry was nervous that night, I also realize that
he was fighting a battle quite his own, and with its personal problems.

"She's got to quit this sort of thing," he said savagely and apropos of
nothing, as we walked along. "It's hard on her, and besides--"

"Yes?"

"She couldn't have learned about it," he said, following his own trail
of thought. "My car brought her from her home to the house-door. She
was brought in to us at once. But don't you see that if there are other
developments, to prove her statements she--well, she's as innocent as a
child, but take Herbert, for instance. Do you suppose he'll believe she
had no outside information?"

"But it was happening while we were shut in the drawing-room."

"So Elinor claims. But if there was anything to hide, it would have
taken time. An hour or so, perhaps. You can see how Herbert would jump
on that."

We went back, I remember, to speaking of the seance itself, and to the
safer subject of the physical phenomena. As I have said, we did not
then know of those experimenters who claim that the medium can evoke
so-called rods of energy, and that by its means the invisible "controls"
can perform their strange feats of levitation and the movement of solid
bodies. Sperry touched very lightly on the spirit side.

"At least it would mean activity," he said. "The thought of an inert
eternity is not bearable."

He was inclined, however, to believe that there were laws of which we
were still in ignorance, and that we might some day find and use the
fourth dimension. He seemed to be able to grasp it quite clearly. "The
cube of the cube, or hypercube," he explained. "Or get it this way: a
cone passed apex-downward through a plane."

"I know," I said, "that it is perfectly simple. But somehow it just
sounds like words to me."

"It's perfectly clear, Horace," he insisted. "But remember this when
you try to work it out; it is necessary to use motion as a translator of
time into space, or of space into time."

"I don't intend to work it out," I said irritably. "But I mean to use
motion as a translator of the time, which is 1:30 in the morning, to
take me to a certain space, which is where I live."

But as it happened, I