he second time he stood stockstill,
weighed down by the feeling of some presence, oppressed by the sense of
something vaguely hanging over him. He felt, as Frank had once said,
how like a half-articulate key, at the end of an impoverished circuit,
consciousness really was; how the spirit so often, in this only
half-intelligible life of theirs, flutters feebly with hints and
suggestions to which it could never give open and unequivocal
utterance. Even language, and language the most artful and finished,
was, after all, merely a sort of clumsy Morse--its unwieldy dots and
dashes left many a mood of the soul unknown and inarticulate.

As he stood there, in doubt, questioning himself and that vague but
disturbing something which stood before him, he decided to put a
summary end to the matter. Fumbling in his pocket, and disregarding
any risk which the movement might entail, he caught up a match and
struck it.

As he shaded the flame and threw it before him, his straining eyes
caught only the glimmer of burnished metal--a guard-rail of some
description--and the dark and ponderous mass of what seemed a deposit
vault.

The match burned down, and dropped from his upthrust fingers. He
decided to grope to the rail, and feel along the metal until he reached
some point of greater safety. He extended his fingers before him, as a
blind man might, and took one shuffling step forward.

Then a thought came to him, with the suddenness and the shock of an
electric current, as a radiating tingle of nerves, followed by a
strangely sickening sense of hollowness about the chest, swept through
his body. _Could it be Frank herself in danger, and wanting him_?

More than once, in the past, he had felt that mysterious medium, more
fluid and unfathomable than electricity itself, carry its vague but
vital message in to him. He had felt that call of Soul to Soul, across
space, along channels less tangible than Hertzian waves themselves, yet
bearing its broken message, which later events had authenticated and
still later cross-questioning had doubly verified.

He had felt, at such moments, that there were ghostly and phantasmal
wires connecting mind with mind; that across these telepathic wires one
anxious spirit could in some way hold dim converse with the other; that
the Soul itself had its elusive "wireless," and forever carried and
gave out and received its countless messages--if only the fellow-Soul
had learned to await the signal