“And these--these--” the voice suddenly dropped, became thickly, vibrantly resonant, “over the Threshold, within the House of Man--nor does he even dream that his doors are down. These--Things of metal whose brains are thinking crystals--Things that suck their strength from the sun and whose blood is the lightning. “The sun! The sun!” he cried. “There lies their weakness!” The voice rose in pitch, grew strident. “Go back to the city! Go back to the city! Walter--Drake. They are not invulnerable. No! The sun--strike them through the sun! Go into the city--not invulnerable--the Keeper of the Cones--strike at the Cones when--the Keeper of the Cones--ah-h-h-ah--” We shrank back appalled, for from the parted, scarcely moving lips in the unchanging face a gust of laughter, mad, mocking, terrifying, racked its way. “Vulnerable--under the law--even as we! The Cones! “Go!” he gasped. A tremor shook him; slowly the mouth closed. “Martin! Brother,” wept Ruth. I thrust my hand into his breast; felt the heart beating, with a curious suggestion of stubborn, unshakable strength, as though every vital force had concentrated there as in a beleaguered citadel. But Ventnor himself, the consciousness that was Ventnor was gone; had withdrawn into that subjective void in which he had said he floated--a lonely sentient atom, his one line of communication with us cut; severed from us as completely as though he were, as he had described it, outside space. And Drake and I looked at each other's eyes, neither daring to be first to break the silence of which the muffled sobbing of the girl seemed to be the sorrowful soul. CHAPTER XIV. “FREE! BUT A MONSTER!” The peculiar ability of the human mind to slip so readily into the refuge of the commonplace after, or even during, some well-nigh intolerable crisis, has been to me long one of the most interesting phenomena of our psychology. It is instinctively a protective habit, of course, acquired through precisely the same causes that had given to animals their protective coloration--the stripes, say, of the zebra and tiger that blend so cunningly with the barred and speckled shadowings of bush and jungle, the twig and leaflike shapes and hues of certain insects; in fact, all that natural camouflage which was the basis of the art of concealment so astonishingly developed in the late war. Like the animals of the wild, the mind of man moves through a jungle--the jungle of life, passing along paths beaten out by the thought of his countless forefathers in their progress from birth to death. And these paths are bordered and screened, figuratively and literally, with bush and trees of his own selection, setting out and cultivation--shelters of the familiar, the habitual, the customary. On these ancestral paths, within these barriers of usage, man moves hidden and secure as the animals in their haunts--or so he thinks.