tion, a complete
change, a horrible loss of oneself by substitution--far worse than
death, and not even annihilation. We happen to have camped in a spot
where their region touches ours where the veil between has worn
thin"--horrors! he was using my very own phrase, my actual words--"so
that they are aware of our being in their neighborhood."

"But _who_ are aware?" I asked.

I forgot the shaking of the willows in the windless calm, the humming
overhead, everything except that I was waiting for an answer that I
dreaded more than I can possibly explain.

He lowered his voice at once to reply, leaning forward a little over the
fire, an indefinable change in his face that made me avoid his eyes and
look down upon the ground.

"All my life," he said, "I have been strangely, vividly conscious of
another region--not far removed from our own world in one sense, yet
wholly different in kind--where great things go on unceasingly, where
immense and terrible personalities hurry by, intent on vast purposes
compared to which earthly affairs, the rise and fall of nations, the
destinies of empires, the fate of armies and continents, are all as dust
in the balance; vast purposes, I mean, that deal directly with the soul,
and not indirectly with mere expressions of the soul--"

"I suggest just now--" I began, seeking to stop him, feeling as though I
was face to face with a madman. But he instantly overbore me with his
torrent that _had_ to come.

"You think," he said, "it is the spirits of the elements, and I thought
perhaps it was the old gods. But I tell you now it is--_neither_. These
would be comprehensible entities, for they have relations with men,
depending upon them for worship or sacrifice, whereas these beings who
are now about us have absolutely nothing to do with mankind, and it is
mere chance that their space happens just at this spot to touch our
own."

The mere conception, which his words somehow made so convincing, as I
listened to them there in the dark stillness of that lonely island, set
me shaking a little all over. I found it impossible to control my
movements.

"And what do you propose?" I began again.

"A sacrifice, a victim, might save us by distracting them until we could
get away," he went on, "just as the wolves stop to devour the dogs and
give the sleigh another start. But--I see no chance of any other victim
now."

I stared blankly at him. The gleam in his eyes was dreadful. Presently
he continu