"Where am I, by the way?" and bent lower to see.
His ear touched the doctor's; it heard the doctor breathing as though he
were the asthmatic; and now a human shape was visible, but not walking in
its sleep, lying in it like the man in the wet grass. "When did you get
me?" asked Pocket aloud. But the tense crimson face paid no attention; in
the ruby light it was glistening as though with beads of blood.

"There! there! there!" croaked a voice, husky and yet staccato. Pocket
could scarcely believe it was the voice of his host--the one gentle thing
about him. "You saw the figure? Surely you saw something else, hovering
over it? I did, I swear I did! But now we shall have to wait."

The plate had blackened all over, as though the uncanny thing had choked
out its life. It was meticulously held under a tap, between fingers that
most distinctly trembled now. Then he plunged it in the hyposulphite, and
pulled up the blind. The sun shone again through the tall window,
blood-red as before; grass and sky were as richly incarnadined.
Baumgartner babbled while he waited for the fixing-bath to clear the
plate. The chance of his life, he still pronounced it. "And I owe it to
you, my young fellow!" This he said again and again, aloud but chiefly to
himself. He picked up the plate at last and held it to the flaming
window. He cried out in German to himself, a cry the schoolboy never
forgot.

"Open the window!" he ordered. "It opens like a door."

Pocket did as he was told. The pure white sunlight struck him momentarily
blind. Baumgartner had the plate under the tap again. Pocket thought him
careless with it, thought the tap on too full; it was held up an instant
to the naked sun, and then dashed to a hundred fragments in the porcelain
trough.

Pocket knew better than to ask a question. He followed his leader back
into the drawing-room, and watched him pick up his coat. It might have
been a minute before their eyes met again; the doctor's were calm and cold
and critical as in the earlier morning. It was another failure, he said,
and nothing more. Breakfast would be ready soon; they would go upstairs;
and if his young fellow felt equal to a warm bath, he thought as a
physician it might do him good.

AN AWAKENING

It was a normal elderly gentleman, with certain simple habits, but no
little distinction of address, who welcomed the schoolboy at his
breakfast-table. The goblin inquisitor of Hyde Park