e star on which he stared; no touch on his shoulder, no whisper in
his ear. It had seemed as he strove there, in the silence, that it
must be done; that there was no limit to power concentrated and
intense. Yet it had not happened....

Once he had shuddered a little; and the very shudder of fear had had
in it a touch of delicious, trembling expectation. Yet it had not
happened.

Laurie relaxed his muscles therefore, let his breath exhale in a long
sigh, and once more remembered the book he had read and Mrs.
Stapleton's feverish, self-conscious thought.

Half an hour later his mother, listening in her bed, heard his
footsteps pass her room.

_Chapter III_

I

Lady Laura Bethell, spinster, had just returned to her house in
Queen's Gate, with her dearest friend, Mrs. Stapleton, for a few days
of psychical orgy. It was in her house, as much as in any in London,
that the modern prophets were to be met with--severe-looking women in
shapeless dresses, little men and big, with long hair and cloaks; and
it was in her drawing-room that tea and Queen cakes were dispensed to
inquirers, and papers read and discussed when the revels were over.

Lady Laura herself was not yet completely emancipated from what her
friends sometimes called the grave-clothes of so-called Revelation.
To her it seemed a profound truth that things could be true and untrue
simultaneously--that what might be facts on This Side, as she would
have expressed it, might be falsehoods on the Other. She was
accustomed, therefore, to attend All Saints', Carlton Gardens, in the
morning, and psychical drawing-rooms or halls in the evening, and to
declare to her friends how beautifully the one aspect illuminated and
interpreted the other.

For the rest, she was a small, fair-haired woman, with penciled dark
eyebrows, a small aquiline nose, gold pince-nez, and an exquisite
taste in dress.

The two were seated this Tuesday evening, a week after
Mrs. Stapleton's visit to the Stantons, in the drawing-room of the
Queen's Gate house, over the remnants of what corresponded to
five-o'clock tea. I say "corresponded," since both of them were
sufficiently advanced to have renounced actual tea altogether. Mrs.
Stapleton partook of a little hot water out of a copper-jacketed jug;
her hostess of boiled milk. They shared their Plasmon biscuits
together. These things were considered important for those who would
successfully find the Higher Light.

At this instant