Kathleen stopped in the hall, to wind the clock. “Don’t forget to lock the front door when you come up, Felix.” She was out of sight, but he could hear her, as well as the turning of the clock key. “I forgot to tell you I saw Adèle Van Orden to-day, at Greenberg’s. They are going down to the Beach Thursday. She told me they haven’t had a cook for three days now, and she and old Mrs. Haggage have had to do all the work. She looked it, too—I never saw any one let themselves go all to pieces the way she has—” “How—? Oh, yes,” he mumbled, intent upon his reading; “it is pretty bad. Don’t many of them keep their looks as you do, dear—” And that was all. He never heard his wife’s voice any more. Kennaston read contentedly for a couple of hours, and went to bed. It was in the morning the maid found Mrs. Kennaston dead and cold. She had died in her sleep, quite peacefully, after taking two headache powders, while her husband was contentedly pursuing the thread of a magazine story through the advertising columns.... Kennaston had never spoken to her concerning the sigil. Indeed, I do not well see how he could have dared to do so, in view of her attitude in a world so opulent in insane asylums. But among her effects, hidden away as before in the press in her bathroom, Kennaston found both the pieces of metal. They were joined together now, forming a perfect circle, but with the line of their former separation yet visible. He showed me the sigil of Scoteia, having told this tale.... * * * * * I had thought from the first there would prove to be supernal double-dealing back of all this. The Wardens of Earth sometimes unbar strange windows, I suspect—windows which face on other worlds than ours; and They permit this-or-that man to peer out fleetingly, perhaps, just for the joke’s sake; since always They humorously contrive matters so this man shall never be able to convince his fellows of what he has seen, or of the fact that he was granted any peep at all. The Wardens without fail arrange what we call—gravely, too—“some natural explanation.” Kennaston showed me the sigil of Scoteia, having told this tale.... “You are interested in such things, you see—just as Kathleen said. And I have sometimes wondered if when she said, ‘Perhaps Mr. Harrowby could tell you,’ the words did not mean more than they seemed then to mean—?” I was interested now, very certainly. But I knew that Kathleen Kennaston had referred not at all to my interest in certain of the less known sides of existence, which people loosely describe as “occult.”