ed, unmoved by
Carrick's fervor. "I can't tell you that. But--you leave me where you
found me--in the hands of my God."

With the same quiet cheerfulness, he crossed to the big chair, turned
it to face the wall, and sat down in it. "I'm quite ready," he said.

Carrick was still standing by the table. He was frowning heavily; the
proceeding was utterly against his inclination. When Mr. Newman
spoke, he sighed windily, a sigh of resignation, of defeat.

"I warned you," he said, and wiped the palms of his hands on his
trousers for what he had to do.

A less honest man than Carrick, finding himself in the like
predicament, might plausibly have contrived a failure. Nothing easier
than to tell Mr. Newman that nerves, a mental burden, or what not,
stood in the way of the adventure. Mr. Carrick got to work forthwith.

Mr. Newman, supine in his chair, knew the preliminary stages of the
process well. They took longer than usual to-night; both of them were
unkeyed and had to compose themselves to the affair. But at last the
visible world, the wall before him, commenced to dislimn; it shifted;
it became mist, writhing and tinged with faint colors, that submerged
his will and his consciousness, till they sank, gathering impetus,
into a void below--the vacancy of the spirit that looses its hold on
the body and is rudderless. He knew the blackness which is death, the
momentary throe of entering it, the shock, the sense of chill, the
dumbness.

"Ah!" Carrick saw that his head fell, and ceased his labors. He
stood, gaunt and perplexed, contemplating the body from which he had
expelled the will, the life--the soul. It was a plump body, well
clad, well fed, a carcase that had absorbed much of its world. It
cost labor and the pains of innumerable toilers to clothe it, nourish
it, maintain it, guard, comfort, and embellish it. And an effort of
ten minutes was enough to drain it of all save the fleshly, the mere
bestial. The habit of his mind impelled him to sneer as he stood
above it, to moralise in the tune of cynicism. "Ecce homo!" were the
words he chanced upon; but the flavor of them troubled him when he
remembered the goal of the journey upon which that absent spirit had
departed.

"Oh, Lord!" said Carrick, in a kind of whispering panic.

He cast scared looks to and fro, as though he feared the great room
should contain a spy upon him. It was empty save for him and that
witless body. He put his hands together with the gesture