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278 force. Then suddenly all sign of struggle ceased, he sat bent forward, but perfectly still, and from the table in front of him came three loud, peremptory raps, as of splitting wood. From the dusk of the room came others which she could not localize.

Archie raised his head, and, instead of leaning over the table, sank back in his chair, his arms hanging limp by his side. He began to whisper to himself, and soon Jessie caught the words.

"Martin, are you here?" he kept repeating. "Martin, are you here? Martin, Martin?"

There was more light in the room now. It came from a pale greyish efflorescence of illumination, globular in shape, that lay apparently over his left breast. It made its immediate neighbourhood quite bright: she could see the stud in his shirt with absolute distinctness. Out of it there came a little wisp of mist that floated up like a stream of smoke above his shoulders. In the air there, independently of this, there was forming another mistlike substance, and the stream that came away from Archie seemed to join this. It began to take shape: it spread upwards and downwards into the semblance of a column, its edges losing themselves in the dark. Lines began to be interwoven within it: it was as if something was forming inside it, like a chicken in an egg. It lost its vagueness of outline, plaiting and weaving itself together: there appeared an arm bare to the shoulder; above that she could see a neck, and slowly above the neck there grew a smiling, splendid face. There seemed to be a grey robe cast about the body, from which the bare arm protruded, but much of this was vague.

Jessie felt as if some awful paralysis of terror lay over her spirit. The whole room, cool and fresh with the night-air passing through the open window, reeked, to her spiritual sense, with evil and unnameable corruption. Over her conscious superficial self, the mechanism