--years!" he said. He grimaced
hysterically and covered up his face again.

After a space he grew calm. He sat up, his hands hanging over his knees
in almost precisely the same attitude in which Isbister had found him
on the cliff at Pentargen. His attention was attracted by a thick
domineering voice, the footsteps of an advancing personage. "What are
you doing? Why was I not warned? Surely you could tell? Someone will
suffer for this. The man must be kept quiet. Are the doorways closed?
All the doorways? He must be kept perfectly quiet. He must not be told.
Has he been told anything?"

The man with the fair beard made some inaudible remark, and Graham
looking over his shoulder saw approaching a very short, fat, and
thickset beardless man, with aquiline nose and heavy neck and chin. Very
thick black and slightly sloping eyebrows that almost met over his
nose and overhung deep grey eyes, gave his face an oddly formidable
expression. He scowled momentarily at Graham and then his regard
returned to the man with the flaxen beard. "These others," he said in a
voice of extreme irritation. "You had better go."

"Go?" said the red-bearded man.

"Certainly--go now. But see the doorways are closed as you go."

The two men addressed turned obediently, after one reluctant glance at
Graham, and instead of going through the archway as he expected, walked
straight to the dead wall of the apartment opposite the archway. And
then came a strange thing; a long strip of this apparently solid wall
rolled up with a snap, hung over the two retreating men and fell again,
and immediately Graham was alone with the new comer and the purple-robed
man with the flaxen beard.

For a space the thickset man took not the slightest notice of Graham,
but proceeded to interrogate the other--obviously his subordinate--upon
the treatment of their charge. He spoke clearly, but in phrases only
partially intelligible to Graham. The awakening seemed not only a matter
of surprise but of consternation and annoyance to him. He was evidently
profoundly excited.

"You must not confuse his mind by telling him things," he repeated again
and again. "You must not confuse his mind."

His questions answered, he turned quickly and eyed the awakened sleeper
with an ambiguous expression.

"Feel queer?" he asked.

"Very."

"The world, what you see of it, seems strange to you?"

"I suppose I have to live in it, strange as it seems."

"I suppose so, now."

"In