With a wry face the clerk retired. Kent opened the door, and his friend squeezed through into a bare room. The walls were hung and the floor was carpeted with white sheets. There was no furniture of any kind, unless a narrow mattress in one corner could be so reckoned. Beside the mattress lay a small pad and a pencil. Only on the visitor’s subconscious self did these peculiarities impress themselves, such was his absorption in his own interests. “It’s happened!” he announced. “Has it?” said Kent. “Lean up against the wall and make yourself at home. Man, you’re shaking!” “You’d shake, too,” retorted the artist, his voice trembling. “No; anger doesn’t affect me that way. Wait! Now, don’t tell me yet. If I’m to have a report, it must be from a sane man, not from one in a blind fury. Take time and cool down. What do you think of my room?” “It looks like the abode of white silence. Have you turned Trappist monk?” “Not such a bad guess. This is the retreat of my mind. I think against the blank walls.” “What’s the game?” asked Sedgwick, interested in spite of himself. “It dates back to our college days. Do you remember that queer freshman, Berwind?” “The mind-reader? Yes. The poor chap went insane afterward.” “Yes. It was a weak mind, but a singularly receptive one. You know we used to force numbers or playing-cards upon his consciousness by merely thinking of them.” “I recollect. His method was to stand gazing at a blank wall. He said the object we were thinking of would rise before him visually against the blankness. Did you ever figure out how he managed to do it?” “Not exactly. But his notion of keeping the mind blank for impressions has its points. If you throw off the clutch of the brain, as it were, and let it work along its own lines, it sometimes arranges and formulates ideas that you wouldn’t get from it under control.” “Sort of self-hypnosis?” “In a sense. For years I’ve kept a bare white room in my Washington house to do my hard thinking in. When your affair promised to become difficult for me, I rigged up this spot. And I’m trying to see things against the walls.” “Any particular kind of things?” Kent produced the silver star from his pocket, and told of its discovery. “The stars in their courses may have fought against Sisera,” he remarked; “but they aren’t going out of their way to fight—to fight—to—to—” Kent’s jaw was sagging down. His lean fingers pulled savagely at the lobe of his long-suffering ear. “The stars in their courses—in their courses—That’s it!” he half whispered. “Sedgwick; _what_ was it your visitor said to you about Jupiter?” “She didn’t mention Jupiter.” “No, of course not. Not by name. But what was it she said about the planet that she pointed out, over the sea?” “Oh; was that Jupiter? How did you know?”