Corsican merchant said. "In my
country, we are less pretentious. Frankly, we are afraid. You, too,
are afraid, and so you laugh! A difference, it seems to me, which
lies, not in the essence but in the manner."

Doctor Fenton smiled queerly. "Perhaps. What do any of us know about
it, one way or the other? Ticklish business! We poke a little too far
beyond our ken and get a shock that withers our souls. Cosmic force!
We stumble forward, bleating for comfort, and fall over a charged
cable. It may have been put there to hold us out--or in."

Aldobrandini, the Italian inventor, was playing cards with a German
engineer. He lost the game to his opponent, and turning about in his
chair, came into the conversation.

"You are talking about ghosts. I have seen them. Once in the Carso.
Again on the campagna near Rome. I met a company of Caesar's
legionaries tramping through a bed of asphodels. The asphodels lay
down beneath those crushing sandals, and then stood upright again,
unharmed."

The engineer shuffled the cards between short, capable fingers.
"Ghosts. Yes, I agree; there are such things. Created out of our
subconscious selves; mirages of the mind; photographic spiritual
projections; hereditary memories. There are always explanations."

Doctor Fenton poked into the bowl of his pipe with a broad thumb. "Did
any of you happen to know the English poet, Cecil Grimshaw? No? I'll
tell you a story about him if you care to listen. A long story, I warn
you. Very curious. Very suggestive. I cannot vouch for the entire
truth of it, since I got the tale from many sources--a word here, a
chance encounter there, and at last only the puzzling reports of men
who saw Grimshaw out in Africa. He wasn't a friend of mine, or I
wouldn't tell these things."

Aldobrandini's dark eyes softened. He leaned forward. "Cecil Grimshaw
... We Latins admire his work more than that of any modern
Englishman."

The doctor tipped his head back against the worn red velvet of the
lounge. An oil lamp, swinging from the ceiling, seemed to isolate him
in a pool of light. Outside, the invisible sea raced astern, hissing
slightly beneath the driving impact of the rain.

I first heard of Grimshaw [the doctor began] in my student days in
London. He was perhaps five years my senior, just beginning to be
famous, not yet infamous, but indiscreet enough to get himself talked
about. He had written a little book of verse, "Vision of Helen," he
called it, I believ