ief that Justice is an ancient
witch whose evil eye can be averted only by the incantation and
grotesque posturing of her initiate priests. But I am not sure that
financiers do not understand the art of hypnotic suggestion best of all.
I have worshipped in cathedrals, sweated cold in operating theatres,
trembled before judges, but there is something about large surfaces of
polished mahogany and very soft, dimly coloured turkey carpets which
quells my feeble spirit still more completely.

There was a heavy deadening silence in Ascher's private office, and our
voices, when they broke it, sounded like the cheeping of ghosts.
There was an odour more oppressive than the smell of incense or the
penetrating fumes of iodoform. Some one, many hours before, must have
smoked a very good cigar in the room, and the scent of it lingered. The
doors of huge safes must have been opened. From the recesses of these
steel chambers had oozed air which had lain stagnant and lifeless round
piles of gold bonds and rich securities for years and years. The faint,
sickly odour of sealing wax must have been distilled from immense
sticks of that substance and sprinkled overnight upon the carpets and
leather-seated chairs. I breathed and my very limbs felt numb.

But certain souls are proof against the subtlest forms of hypnotism.
Gorman had escaped from the influence of his church. He would flip a
sterilised lancet across a glass slab with his finger and laugh in the
face of the surgeon who owned it. He walked with buoyant confidence into
Ascher's office. My case was different. I stood and then sat, the victim
of a partial anaesthetic. I saw and heard dimly as if in a dream, or
through a mist. Poor Tim trembled as he laid his cash register down on
one of Ascher's mahogany tables. I could hear the keys and bars of the
machine rattling together while he handled it.

Ascher spoke through a telephone receiver which stood at his elbow.
Another man entered the room. We all shook hands with him. He was Stutz,
the New York partner of the firm. Then Ascher spoke through the receiver
again, and another man came in.

With him we did not shake hands, but he bowed to us and we to him. He
was Mr. Mildmay. He stood near the door, waiting for orders.

Tim Gorman unpacked his machine and exhibited it I have not the remotest
idea what its peculiar virtues are, but Tim believed in them. His
nervousness seemed to pass away from him as he spoke about his invention