He had fallen into a kind of trance in which immediate sensations of place and time were suspended. The cold room, now wrapped in an almost complete darkness in which rats were scratching and scuttling; the drip drip of the water to the floor; the rattle of the windows against the rising gale; the roar of the traffic in the street--all had become submerged, had lost their form, had been blended into a strange yet not inharmonious something else. A pageant was passing before his mind. He was powerless to identify himself with it, to fix its colors, to catch the expressions of the fleeting faces of those who mingled in it, yet despite the suspension of the functions of the will, he was conscious of what was taking place. He was not in a dream, because his eyes were open, he knew where he was, and he was in possession of the sense of hearing. But he had surrendered the control of the will; and although he was on his knees with his face pressed to a dusty table before a dead fire, the mind was become divorced from the body and was cast into the vortex of indescribable scenes. It drifted about among them helplessly. It bore no relation to actors or events. All was the weirdest panorama, crammed with hurry and wild inconsequence; and yet the spectator was filled with an exhilaration which was as remote from the province of reality as a drunkard’s delirium. He began to make frantic efforts to fix and locate this phantasmagoria. He stretched every nerve to catch the import of the word that was spoken; he craned his whole being to wrest a single incident from this wild confusion. He strove as fiercely for a thread of meaning as though he were fighting against the operations of an anæsthetic, but he could reclaim nothing from the chaos in which he was enveloped. He was like a drowning man with the heavy yet not unpleasant rush of water in his ears. Suddenly his mind was invaded by a distinct sound. It had the dull sense of finality of a blow on the head. The door of the room had been flung open. And then came a voice through the shadows which encompassed the last feeble gutterings of the lamp: “Anybody at home?” Northcote rose from his knees in a wild and startled manner. “Who--who is that?” he cried, in a hollow tone. “Is that Mr. Northcote?” said the obscure presence which had entered the room. IV ENTER MR. WHITCOMB For the second time that evening Northcote peered through the gloom of his chamber with a thrill of curious expectancy. The visit of the scarecrow had been forgotten in the torments of his passion, but the sound of his own name on the lips of the unknown resummoned that phantom to his mind. But in the room of one so frail was a robust and spreading presence. “To whom do I owe a welcome?” muttered Northcote, and as he rose from his knees his words seemed to be lost in the vibrations of his heart. “Mr. Northcote it is,” said the round and full tones of the invader.