Captain Sergeantson, Jimmy Lomax’s chum, had obvious cause for cheerfulness. Attached to a Special Service Department, he had just returned from Europe, where he had fulfilled an extremely difficult mission with conspicuous success. His home-coming had provided the excuse for this little dinner-party. As for Professor Lomax, Jimmy’s father, no one had ever seen him other than in high spirits. The author--after a lifetime of profound and exact scientific research that had earned him a world-wide reputation--of an enquiry into the possible survival of human personality, which was the controversial topic of that winter and which threatened to deprive him of that reputation, he was in striking contrast with the idea of him propagated by the sensational Press. There was nothing of the visionary about those clear-cut features. A stranger would have diagnosed him as a lawyer--a lawyer whose judicial perception of evidence was clarified by a sense of humour. The mobile mouth, even in silence, hinted at this latter quality. The eyes twinkled, eminently sane, under a well-balanced brow. He joked like a schoolboy with his host’s daughter, exciting--for the secretly selfish pleasure of hearing it--her gay young laugh. Occasionally he glanced across to his son, approbation in his eyes. Hetty Forsdyke, the only woman of the party, was a typical specimen of self-reliant, college-bred American girl. Good to look upon, her beauty hinted at a race which had been proud of its exclusiveness long after Napoleon had sold Louisiana to the States. Her vivacity and charm had roots, perhaps, in the same stock, but the cool, level-headed understanding of life, which she expressed in a slang that provoked her father to vain rebuke, and the genuineness of which was vouched for by her clear gray eyes, was an attribute of the Forsdykes and the North. The dinner was nearly at an end. Forsdyke, launched on a story of a Presidential campaign in the Middle West a generation ago, had arrived at the stage where the chuckles of his hearers were on the point of culminating in the final burst of laughter. Hetty, her glass between her fingers, half-way to her mouth, was looking at him with a smile that pretended the story was quite new to her. Suddenly her expression changed. She stared, as if spell-bound, at the dark curtains from which her father’s oval face detached itself in the illumination of the table. The glass slipped from her fingers, smashed. Forsdyke’s story ceased abruptly. Four pairs of alarmed eyes focussed themselves upon his daughter. Jimmy, involuntarily, had half risen from his chair. The movement seemed to recall the girl to her surroundings. She shuddered and then, with an evident effort of will, brought back her gaze to the table. Her smile routed the momentary anxiety of her companions.