I moved about the room in the familiarity which our informal meal had fostered, looking at the knick-knacks, the row of books on the shelves. They were a pretty varied collection, poetry, some modern French scientific books and novels, and one of the most complete collections of detective literature I have ever encountered, side by side with a few text-books on chemistry and some volumes on occultism and black magic, some familiar to me by title, others unknown. There was a monthly magazine lying near which I recognized as occupying itself largely with the subject of psychic phenomena, and turning it over I noticed Lessing's name in the index. "You write?" I asked. "Once in a blue moon!" He looked up from a critical stage in his coffee-making. "Does that sort of thing interest you?" "Indifferently--if it happens to be genuine." "There's so little genuine." He withdrew the coffee deftly, blowing out the lamp, and stood the little copper pot aside. "That's the worst of it. One endures hours of boredom for no result." "You belong to the P.R.S.?" "A most respectable and unexciting body." He smiled. "I would give in my demission, only they afford me a patient hearing from time to time. Besides, it gives me the opportunity of wrangling with someone, and contention is the spice of life, as I was saying. It was with that truism that I strove to console Lennox, when I bored him to extinction." Involuntarily my ears pricked. "Was that often?" "No, I can't say the boredom predominated, in the long run." He surveyed his coffee with the air of an artist, his boyish head on one side. "Where are those cups, Mary?" "Your system of boredom seemed to have a remarkable effect on Lennox, anyway," slipped from me involuntarily. Lessing laughed. "Oh, that was when the boredom ended! He stood it nobly to a point." He turned toward me. "Would you like to see what frightened Lennox, sometime?" Before I could answer Mary Lessing came in with the coffee-cups, and the subject was dropped. It was ten o'clock when I rose to leave, my departure hastened by a suspicion that Mrs. Lessing had glanced several times of purpose at the clock. They all came out on the porch to say good night, and at the last moment Lessing added: "I'll walk down the hill with you." "I've got my bicycle," I said quickly, as Miss Lessing looked up. "There's no need to bring you out." "Oh, it'll do me good!" It was a still, sultry night, with a humidity in the air that had arisen since nightfall. We walked leisurely, smoking, as far as the crossroad at the top of Dutchman's Hill. The hollow below was alive with fireflies, gleaming and vanishing alternately in the soft dusk. There should be a moon, but within the past hour premonitory rainclouds had gathered, blotting it out. Lessing glanced at the sky. "How long will it take you to get back?" "Ten minutes, more or less. It won't rain till I get there." I scratched a match, stooping toward my bicycle lantern.