burn and glow. Then they
seemed to coarsen and somehow slip confusedly together. He stared for a
second--it seemed only for a second--into the visage of a ferocious and
abominable animal; and then, as suddenly as it had come, the filthy
shadow of the beast passed off, the mist melted out, and with a mighty
effort over his nerves he forced himself to finish his sentence.

"You see it's so long since I've given attention to such things," he
stammered. His heart was beating rapidly, and a feeling of oppression
was gathering over it.

"It's my peculiar and special study on the other hand," Garvey resumed.
"I've not spent all these years in my laboratory to no purpose, I can
assure you. Nature, I know for a fact," he added with unnatural warmth,
"does _not_ abhor a vacuum. On the contrary, she's uncommonly fond of
'em, much too fond, it seems, for the comfort of my little household. If
there were fewer vacuums and more abhorrence we should get on better--a
damned sight better in my opinion."

"Your special knowledge, no doubt, enables you to speak with authority,"
Shorthouse said, curiosity and alarm warring with other mixed feelings
in his mind; "but how _can_ a man tumble into a vacuum?"

"You may well ask. That's just it. How can he? It's preposterous and I
can't make it out at all. Marx knows, but he won't tell me. Jews know
more than we do. For my part I have reason to believe--" He stopped and
listened. "Hush! here he comes," he added, rubbing his hands together as
if in glee and fidgeting in his chair.

Steps were heard coming down the passage, and as they approached the
door Garvey seemed to give himself completely over to an excitement he
could not control. His eyes were fixed on the door and he began
clutching the tablecloth with both hands. Again his face was screened by
the loathsome shadow. It grew wild, wolfish. As through a mask, that
concealed, and yet was thin enough to let through a suggestion of, the
beast crouching behind, there leaped into his countenance the strange
look of the animal in the human--the expression of the were-wolf, the
monster. The change in all its loathsomeness came rapidly over his
features, which began to lose their outline. The nose flattened,
dropping with broad nostrils over thick lips. The face rounded, filled,
and became squat. The eyes, which, luckily for Shorthouse, no longer
sought his own, glowed with the light of untamed appetite and bestial
greed. The hands left the