losed against him again, and he was
foiled. He beat himself passionately against this, and all about him
the spirits of evil grinned and pointed and mocked. He gave way to
furious anger. He compares himself to a bird that has fluttered
heedlessly into a room and is beating at the window-pane that holds it
back from freedom.

And behold! the little body that had once been his was now dancing with
delight. He saw it shouting, though he could not hear its shouts; he
saw the violence of its movements grow. He watched it fling his
cherished furniture about in the mad delight of existence, rend his
books apart, smash bottles, drink heedlessly from the jagged fragments,
leap and smite in a passionate acceptance of living. He watched these
actions in paralysed astonishment. Then once more he hurled himself
against the impassable barrier, and then with all that crew of mocking
ghosts about him, hurried back in dire confusion to Vincey to tell him
of the outrage that had come upon him.

But the brain of Vincey was now closed against apparitions, and the
disembodied Mr. Bessel pursued him in vain as he hurried out into
Holborn to call a cab. Foiled and terror-stricken, Mr. Bessel swept
back again, to find his desecrated body whooping in a glorious frenzy
down the Burlington Arcade....

And now the attentive reader begins to understand Mr. Bessel's
interpretation of the first part of this strange story. The being
whose frantic rush through London had inflicted so much injury and
disaster had indeed Mr. Bessel's body, but it was not Mr. Bessel. It
was an evil spirit out of that strange world beyond existence, into
which Mr. Bessel had so rashly ventured. For twenty hours it held
possession of him, and for all those twenty hours the dispossessed
spirit-body of Mr. Bessel was going to and fro in that unheard-of
middle world of shadows seeking help in vain. He spent many hours
beating at the minds of Mr. Vincey and of his friend Mr. Hart. Each,
as we know, he roused by his efforts. But the language that might
convey his situation to these helpers across the gulf he did not know;
his feeble fingers groped vainly and powerlessly in their brains.
Once, indeed, as we have already told, he was able to turn Mr. Vincey
aside from his path so that he encountered the stolen body in its
career, but he could not make him understand the thing that had
happened: he was unable to draw any help from that encounter....

All through