John is back on the seas as ship's doctor, the Colonel is laired up at the Albany, and Arold lives in Kirkcudbright, swilling great vats of Scotch whisky, I have no doubt. One day soon we must all get together for a grand reunion.... * * * * * But a man cannot walk through fire without being burnt; and as there cannot be many such conflagrations as that through which I groped and fled and sought my way, it is only natural that my mind carries even yet a few scars of the burning. I do not expect--I dare not hope--that they will ever be wholly healed. In certain moods, usually on dreary days when the sky is overcast and the sun is hidden, or sometimes at night when the great yellow hunter's moon rides in a black sky, the horror of the usurpers comes upon me with fresh and lurid obsession, more appalling than ever it was in the weeks of my hectic and headlong warfare. Then I go out into the streets or wander on the moorlands and fight with my hallucinations. A thousand times I tell myself that _they_ are gone, that the world is clean and inviolate again; and a thousand times I hear in reply the hideous laughter of the fear that lives forever at the bottom of my soul. I walk past a tavern, and see its door swing open, and catch a glimpse of the barman; and he seems to me in that moment to be, not a jovial red-faced fellow, but a twisting writhing monster shot with vivid lights and fringed with rippling pseudopods. A friend comes up behind to clap me on the shoulder, and I dread to turn and look at him, for fear of what he may be. I hear a snatch of speech from a wireless set, and the soft cultured voice emanates, I believe in a sudden jolt of panic, from the lips of a marionette-creature controlled by a hellish and malevolent incubus. So at last I take my terror home to Marion, and lose it in her arms....