t the sight of him I fiddled with
my knuckles and giggled.

"You _are_ going it, Benlian!" I said.

"Am I not?" he replied, in a voice that was scarcely a breath.

"You _meant_ me to bring the camera and magnesium, didn't you?" (I had
snatched them up when I felt his call, and had brought them.)

"Yes. Go ahead."

So I placed the camera before him, made all ready, and took the magnesium
ribbon in a pair of pincers.

"Are you ready?" I said; and lighted the ribbon.

The studio seemed to leap with the blinding glare. The ribbon spat and
spluttered. I snapped the shutter, and the fumes drifted away and hung
in clouds in the roof.

"You'll have to walk me about soon, Pudgie, and bang me with bladders, as
they do the opium-patients," he said sleepily.

"Let me take one of the statue now," I said eagerly.

But he put up his hand.

"No, no. _That's_ too much like testing our god. Faith's the food they
feed gods on, Pudgie. We'll let the S.P.R. people photograph it when it's
all over," he said. "Now get it developed."

I developed the plate. The obliteration now seemed complete.

But Benlian seemed dissatisfied.

"There's something wrong somewhere," he said. "It isn't so perfect as
that yet--I can feel within me it isn't. It's merely that your camera
isn't strong enough to find me, Pudgie."

"I'll get another in the morning," I cried.

"No," he answered. "I know something better than that. Have a cab here by
ten o'clock in the morning, and we'll go somewhere."

By half-past ten the next morning we had driven to a large hospital, and
had gone down a lot of steps and along corridors to a basement room.
There was a stretcher couch in the middle of the room, and all manner of
queer appliances, frames of ground glass, tubes of glass blown into
extraordinary shapes, a dynamo, and a lot of other things all about. A
couple of doctors were there too, and Benlian was talking to them.

"We'll try my hand first," Benlian said by-and-by.

He advanced to the couch, and put his hand under one of the frames of
ground glass. One of the doctors did something in a corner. A harsh
crackling filled the room, and an unearthly, fluorescent light shot and
flooded across the frame where Benlian's hand was. The two doctors
looked, and then started back. One of them gave a cry. He was sickly
white.

"Put me on the couch," said Benlian.

I and the doctor who was not ill lifted him on the canvas stretcher. The
green-gleaming fram