Page:The Master of Mysteries (1912).djvu/109

 it!" He dropped in exhaustion into an armchair, looking anxiously at the crystal-gazer. The fingers of one hand twitched nervously, while his other fist was clenched. His forehead was lined with vertical wrinkles.

Astro, still unperturbed, looked at him gravely, his quick eye darting from point to point of the young man's clothing. Finally he said languidly, with an almost imperceptible foreign accent, "My dear sir, the Turks have a proverb, 'He who is in a hurry is already half mad.' If you were in such haste to see me, you should have taken a cab to come here, instead of a street-car."

The young man pulled himself together, sat up, and stared hard at the Seer. Then his face relaxed, as he said, with a tone of great relief, nodding his head, "That's wonderful! It's exactly what I did. Oh, I know you can do it, if you only will! The police are all stupid, there isn't a man with a brain on the whole force, I believe. You're the man to help me!"

Astro made a graceful gesture with his long slender hand. "It is not a question of brains, my dear sir. It is a question of the right comprehension of the forces of the occult, of undeveloped senses and powers. Men need sign-boards to show them the way from town to town. The birds wing their straight paths by instinct. It is my fortune to be sensitive to vibrations that most minds do not register. Where you see a body, I see a spirit, a life, an invisible color. All these esoteric laws have been known by the priestcraft of the occult for ages. Nothing is hidden from the Inner Eye."

"I don't know how you get it," the young man inter-