huck" of the lizards, the rattle of dice
falling on to a board at some remote distance miles and miles away, and
yet strangely audible to his dull ears. Still he sat there, and flashes
of fancies came and went. Sometimes he stood in an English garden, with
a far-away sunlit glimpse of glittering waters, and a cuckoo crying in a
wood of waving trees, and then he knew that he was a boy, and that he
had forgotten everything that had happened since; and then, without
warning, he was swept out of the garden and stood under Eastern trees,
lost in a wild place, with the haunting face of the image at his
shoulder. The face altered. Sometimes it was Mhtoon Pah's pointing man,
and what he pointed at was never clear. The mistiness bothered him
horribly.

The _Durwan_ outside played on a wistful little flute, thinking that his
master was asleep; he heard it, and it did not concern him; he was dead
to all outward things just then, and the flute only added to the mystery
of the dream that spun itself in his brain. He wandered in a place so
near actual things and yet so far from them, that the gigantic mistake
of it all, and the consciousness that the inner life could at times
conquer the outer life, made him fall away between the two conditions,
lost and helpless. His head nodded forward, and his lower lip dropped,
and yet his eyes were open, as he sat facing the small squatting Buddha,
whose changeless face changed only for him.

The three little flute-notes tripped out after each other with no
semblance at a tune, repeating and reiterating the sound in the dark
outside, and Joicey listened as though something of weight depended upon
his hearing steadily. The sound was the one thing that made him know
that he was real, and once it ceased, or he ceased to hear it, he would
be across the gulf and terribly lost; a mind without a body, let loose
in a world where there were no landmarks, no known roads, nothing but
windy space, and he was afraid of that place, and feared terribly to go
there.

Something shuffled on the stone veranda, another sound, and sound was of
value to Craven Joicey, since it made a vital note in the circling
numbness around him. He could hear whispering voices, and the thump of
the _Durwan's_ stick, as that musically-minded man walked round to the
back of the house, where his lighted window showed that Craven Joicey
did not sleep. Again a voice whispered, and a low sound of discreet
knocking followed.

Joicey