ted smile.

Carrick moved in his chair, with a half-gesture as of irritation.

"Look here," he said. "Pull yourself together, Newman. There are
limits, you know, after all."

Two days elapsed before the evening on which the attempt was to be
made; Carrick, alleging difficulties and dangers with long scientific
names, had refused to try it earlier. He had been unwilling to try it
at all.

"I don't want to mix up a matter of clear science with your religious
emotions," he had declared. "And I've got a certain amount of
religion of my own, for that matter. I manage to believe in it
without corroboration; what's the matter with yours, that you can't
do the same?"

But it was not corroboration which Mr. Newman desired. He had not so
much argued as insisted; and it had been difficult to reason with his
manner of one buoyed up, exalted, inspired. He had had his way, on
the sole condition that he should wait two days--"and give sanity a
chance," Carrick had added.

But on the stroke of nine, on the appointed evening, he was standing
within the door of Carrick's study, his hat in his hand, a white silk
muffler about his neck, instead of a collar.

"I was very careful to eat very little at dinner," were his first
words.

Carrick, who had been looking forward to his arrival with nervous
dread, glanced up sharply with an affectation of annoyance at an
interruption.

"More fool you," he barked, in his harshest voice. Mr. Newman smiled,
and laid his hat down on the table and began to unwind his muffler.

Carrick frowned at him. "I'm rather busy to-night, Newman," he said.
That had no effect. He rose. "Besides, something has occurred to me,
and--it is not safe, you know."

Mr. Newman laid his muffler beside his hat; without it he had a
curiously incomplete and undressed appearance. He turned round.

"Oh yes, it is," he contradicted mildly. "As safe as it was on
Monday, at any rate!"

"Ah!" Carrick caught him up eagerly. "But that wasn't safe, either.
I hadn't thought of this then. You see, we don't understand yet how
the thing applies. What is it that becomes conscious in the period
you see? Is it you, in an earlier incarnation? If so, supposing I--I
let go of you at a time when you were dead! What happens then? Do I
get you back--or what?"

He tried to make the consideration graphic, driving it at Mr.
Newman's serenity with a knit brow and a moving forefinger.

Mr. Newman shook his head. "I don't know," he answer