tly shrewd and sane man, with, moreover, a
youthful kind of brisk humor that is perhaps the surest symptom of
sanity that it is possible to have.

He had seen him in court for years past under every sort of
circumstance, and if it had been required of him to select a character
with which superstition and morbid humbug could have had nothing in
common, he would have laid his hand upon the senior partner of
Cathcart and Cathcart. Yet here was this sane man, taking this
fantastic nonsense as if there were really something in it. He had
first heard him speak of the subject at a small bachelor dinner party
of four in the rooms of a mutual friend; and, as he had listened, he
had had the same sensation as one would have upon hearing a Cabinet
Minister, let us say, discussing stump-cricket with enthusiasm.
Cathcart had said all kinds of things when once he was started--all
with that air of businesslike briskness that was so characteristic of
him and so disconcerting in such a connection. If he had apologized
for it as an amiable weakness, if he had been in the least shamefaced
or deprecatory, it would have been another matter; one would have
forgiven it as one forgives any little exceptional eccentricity. But
to hear him speak of materialization as of a process as normal (though
unusual) as the production of radium, and of planchette as of wireless
telegraphy--as established, indubitable facts, though out of the range
of common experience--this had amazed this very practical man.
Cathcart had hinted too of other things--things which he would not
amplify--of a still more disconcertingly impossible nature--matters
which Morton had scarcely thought had been credible even to the
darkest medievalists; and all this with that same sharp, sane humor
that lent an air of reality to all that he said.

For romantic young asses like Laurie Baxter such things were not so
hopelessly incongruous, though obviously they were bad for him; they
were all part of the wild credulousness of a religious youth; but for
Cathcart, aged sixty-two, a solicitor in good practice, with a wife
and two grown-up daughters, and a reputation for exceptionally sound
shrewdness--! But it must be remembered he was a Catholic!

So Mr. James Morton sat in the "Cock" and pondered. He was not sorry
he had tried to take steps to choke off this young fool, and he was
just a little sorry that so far they had failed. He had written to
Miss Deronnais in an impulse, after an