so
indistinguishably that the two were one. But truth, detaching herself,
showed her candid face. The shadows elongating, reached up and darkened
it. The candour remained, but the candour had become terrible. Cassy saw
it. She saw that the land to which she had been lifted was the land of
beauty and horror. It was then she shivered.

Instantly something touched her. There was no one. The land, the beauty,
the horror had faded. No longer on the heights, she was in a trivial
room in Harlem. She was awake. She was absolutely alone. None the less
something that was nothing, something invisible, inaudible, intangible,
imperceptible, something emanating from the depths where events crouch,
prepared to pounce, had touched her. She knew it, she felt it. Her
impulse was to scream, to rush away. But from what? It was all
imaginary. Common-sense, that can be so traitorous, told her that. Then,
immediately, before the wireless from the unknown, which modern
occultism calls the impact, could impel her, the room was invaded.

Ma Tamby, tramping in, switching on the lights, was exclaiming and
gesticulating at her and at Paliser, who had followed and who was
standing in the doorway.

"Dearie! For God's sake! The child's asleep! In all my born days I never
knew the likes of that!"

Icily Cassy eyed her. "What have you there?"

"Where? What? This?" Feelingly the woman exhibited a nice, big package.
"Why, the things I bought for you!"

"And do you for a moment suppose that I am going to carry a bundle?"

"Saints alive, child! Didn't you tell me----"

But now Paliser, in his cultured voice, intervened. "If I may have it?"
He took it, moved to the window, leaned from it, called: "Mike! You see
this? Then see too that you don't muff it."

The bundle vanished.

He turned to Cassy. "I telephoned to Dr. Grantly. He is a clergyman. It
might seem uncivil to keep him waiting."

Cassy saw him at once--a starchy old man, with a white tie and little
side whiskers, who lived--and would die--in a closed circle of thought.

Then again that nothing touched her, though, because of the others, more
lightly, less surely. But it touched her. She was quite conscious of it,
equally conscious that there was still time, that she could still
desist, that she had only to say that she would not, that she had
changed her mind and tell them no, right out and be hanged to them. On
the strawberry of her tongue it trembled. At once before her there
float