d importance to the
thing. On my expressing the opinion that Mrs. Armitage was the most
troubled of the group, he was irritated; and urged me to leave the rest
of them alone and devote whatever sense I might possess to persuading
her in particular that the entire thing was and could be nothing but
pure myth. He confessed frankly that to him it was still a mystery. He
could easily regard it as chimera, but for one slight incident. He would
not for a long while say what that was, but there is such a thing as
perseverance, and in the end I dragged it out of him. This is what he
told me.

"We happened by chance to find ourselves alone in the conservatory, that
night of the ball--we six. Most of the crowd had already left. The last
'extra' was being played: the music came to us faintly. Stooping to
pick up Jessica's fan, which she had let fall to the ground, something
shining on the tesselated pavement underneath a group of palms suddenly
caught my eye. We had not said a word to one another; indeed, it was
the first evening we had any of us met one another--that is, unless the
thing was not a dream. I picked it up. The others gathered round me, and
when we looked into one another's eyes we understood: it was a broken
wine-cup, a curious goblet of Bavarian glass. It was the goblet out of
which we had all dreamt that we had drunk."

I have put the story together as it seems to me it must have happened.
The incidents, at all events, are facts. Things have since occurred to
those concerned affording me hope that they will never read it. I should
not have troubled to tell it at all, but that it has a moral.

*****

Six persons sat round the great oak table in the wainscoted _Speise
Saal_ of that cosy hostelry, the Kneiper Hof at Konigsberg. It was late
into the night. Under ordinary circumstances they would have been in
bed, but having arrived by the last train from Dantzic, and having
supped on German fare, it had seemed to them discreeter to remain awhile
in talk. The house was strangely silent. The rotund landlord, leaving
their candles ranged upon the sideboard, had wished them "Gute Nacht"
an hour before. The spirit of the ancient house enfolded them within its
wings.

Here in this very chamber, if rumour is to be believed, Emmanuel Kant
himself had sat discoursing many a time and oft. The walls, behind which
for more than forty years the little peak-faced man had thought and
worked, rose silvered by the moonlight just