At first it would do little more than force him to ask over and over again: Why? Why? Why? Why did we do this imbecile thing? Why, when we had all the world to choose from, did we find our way back into this horrible house? It was a temptation to call the thing magic and to have done with it, really to suggest that the older Crispin had wizard powers, or at least hypnotic, and had willed them back. But he forced himself to look at the whole thing clearly as a piece of real life as true and as actual as the ham-and-eggs and buttered toast that in another hour or two all the world around him would be eating. Yes, as real and actual as a toothbrush, that was what this thing was; there was nothing wizard about Crispin; he was a dangerous lunatic, and there were hundreds like him in any asylum in the country. As for their return he knew well enough that in a fog people either walked round and round in a circle or returned to the place that they had started from. At this point in his thoughts a tremor shook his body. He knew what _that_ was from, and the anticipation that, lying like a chained animal, deep in the recesses of his brain, must soon be loosed and then bravely faced. But not yet, oh no, not yet! Let his mind stay with the past as long as it might. In the past was Crispin. He looked back over that first meeting with him, the actual moment when he had asked him for a match, the dinner, the return to the hotel when, influenced then by all that Dunbar had told him, he had seen him standing there, the polite gestures, the hospitable words, the drive in the motor. . . . His mind stopped abruptly _there._ The door swung to, the lock was turned. In that earlier Crispin there had been something deeply pathetic--and when he dared to look forward--he would see that in the later Crispin there was the same. So with a sudden flash of lightning revelation that seemed to flare through the whole dark room he saw that it was not the real Crispin with whom they--Hesther, Dunbar and he--were dealing at all. No more than the ravings of fever were the real patient, the wicked cancerous growth the real body, the broken glass the real picture that seemed to be shattered beneath it. They were dealing with a wild and dangerous animal, and in the grip of that animal, pitiably, was the true struggling suffering soul of Crispin. Not struggling now perhaps any more; the disease had gone too far, growing through a thousand tiny almost unnoticed stages to this horrible possession. He knew now--yes, as he had never known it, and would perhaps never have known it had it not been for the sudden love for and tenderness towards human nature that had come to him that night--what, in the old world, they had meant by the possession of evil spirits. What it was that Christ had cast out in His ministry. What it was from which David had delivered King Saul.