have put myself back
into the tenth century. Yes, that is certainly tenth-century armour that
they're wearing. I mustn't let them see me, or there's no telling what
they'd think of an elderly gentleman in a soft hat and a
twentieth-century morning suit. But perhaps," he went on with his
reasoning, "they can't see me at all. My condition is N to the fourth
now. There's a thousand years between us; I forgot that. At any rate,
I'll try it."

He walked quickly down the avenue, and stood by the side of the rugged
path looking at the strange spectacle. No one took the slightest notice
of him. And then a chill of awful loneliness struck him. Although he
could see and move and hear, and, no doubt, eat and drink in this world,
he was unexistent as regards the inhabitants of it, and yet he knew
perfectly well he was standing by the side of the road where the
motor-car ought to be, and over there, a few hundred yards away, Niti
would be sitting in her room or walking in the garden--and she wouldn't
be born for nearly a thousand years yet.

It was certainly somewhat disquieting, this power of living in two
existences and different ages, but it was a matter that would take some
little time to get accustomed to.

The next instant the cavalcade and the forest had vanished, and there
was the motor-car, just spinning past him. He was on the Wimbledon
Common of the twentieth century once more. He stroked his clean-shaven
chin with his finger and thumb, and walked slowly along the path by the
side of the road, and then across the grass towards the flagstaff.

"I think I begin to see it now," he murmured. "Of course, life, that is
to say real, intellectual, or, as some would say, spiritual life, is,
after all, the coefficient of that totally unexplainable thing called
thought which enables us to explain most things except itself. Time and
space and location are only realities to us in so far that we can see
them. A human being born blind, dumb, deaf, and without feeling would
still, I suppose, be a human being, because it would be conscious of
existence; it would breathe and know that its heart was beating, but
without sight or sensation there could be no idea of space--time, to it,
would be a meaningless series of breaths or heartbeats. Without touch or
sight it could have no idea of form or size, which are merely conditions
of space, and both the past and the future would be absolutely
non-existent for it."

He paused, and walked