Page:The cream of the jest; a comedy of evasions (IA creamofjestcomed00caberich).pdf/292

 "You are interested in such things, you see—just as Kathleen said. And I have sometimes wondered if when she said, 'Perhaps Mr. Harrowby could tell you,' the words did not mean more than they seemed then to mean—?"

I was interested now, very certainly. But I knew that Kathleen Kennaston had referred not at all to my interest in certain of the less known sides of existence, which people loosely describe as "occult."

And slowly, I comprehended that for the thousandth time the Wardens of Earth were uncompromised; that here too They stayed unconvicted of negligence in Their duty: for here was at hand the "natural explanation." Kennaston's was one of those curious, but not uncommon, cases of self-hypnosis, such as Fehlig and Alexis Bidoche have investigated and described. Kennaston's first dream of Ettarre had been an ordinary normal dream, in no way particularly remarkable; and afterward, his will to dream again of Ettarre, co-*operating with his queer reading, his temperament, his idle life, his belief in the sigil, and co-*operating too—as yet men may not say just how*