First he told himself it could not be true; that it was a hideous imagination born of his broodings. This was the fag-end of the nineteenth century in which he lived, when supernatural events did not happen. Then he told himself it must be true--the testimony before his eyes proved the fact of what he could not see. Then something happened which, as far as Major Foxmaster was concerned, settled the issue. On a winter night, after rough weather, the Major came feebly out of the Kenilworth Club, groping his way and muttering to himself. This habit of muttering to himself was one that had come on him just lately. There were patches of ice upon the sidewalk, and the wind, like a lazy housewife, had dusted the snow back into corners and under projections. Between the porticoes of the doorway his foot slipped on one of these little ice patches. He threw out his gloved left hand to catch at some support and his fingers closed on her black-clad arm, where she had drawn herself into the shelter and shadow of the door-arch to await his appearance. For the first time in nearly fifty years he touched her. He jerked his hand back and fled away at a staggering, crippling run; and, as he ran to hide himself within his rooms, in panting gulps he blasphemed the name of his Maker; for to his feel her flesh, through the thick cloth sleeve on her arm, had seemed to him to be as firm and plump as it had felt when he was twenty-two and she was twenty. The evidence was complete. * * * * * All through the next day he kept himself behind closed doors, wrestling with his torments; but in the evening old Sherwan came for him and he dressed himself. They started out together, a doddering, tottering twain; suggesting, when they halted for a moment to rest at the foot of the office stairs, a pair of grey locust husks from which age, spider-fashion, had sucked out all the rich juices of health and strength; suggesting, when they went on again, a pair of crawling sick beetles which, though sick, still could crawl a little. Side by side they crossed the tarnished, shabby old lobby, with its clumpings of dingy grey pillars and its red-plush sofa seats, and, in the centre, its rotunda mounting to the roof, up floor by floor, in spiral rings that in perspective graduated smaller and smaller, like an inverted funnel; and side by side they issued forth from beneath the morguelike copings of the outer door and descended the Gaunt House steps--Major Foxmaster feeling ahead of him with his cane, and Judge Sherwan patting his left breast with his open hand--just as Policeman Joel Bosler, now dead and gone, had seen them do upon many another such evening as this. Promptly and inevitably befell another thing, then, which likewise the late deceased Bosler had witnessed times without number.