"Why, you've changed it all!" was Monty Rooke's first exclamation as Philip stood there with the candle held at arm's-length.

As for myself, I was looking round the dark, clammy place with a positive passion of curiosity. That it had been rearranged I knew at once from Monty's former description of it. The dust-sheeted furniture and packing-cases had been pushed back against the walls, leaving the middle of the floor clear, and once more the candlelight barely penetrated into the gloomy recesses. It showed Philip's face, too, serious, but not to the complete exclusion of a certain quiet satisfaction and triumph. And in Hubbard's sailor eyes I fancied I already saw the dawning of comprehension.

"No I haven't—that is, I've only changed it back again as it was," Philip replied. "I told you I'd been moving furniture that morning.... Well, do you want to lose a bet, Cecil?"

Hubbard spoke oddly quietly. "No. I'll win one," he said.

"Ah! Then you're barred.... Take this, somebody, and you fellows wait here. I shall be back in a minute."

He thrust into my hand the candle, which he instantly blew out, leaving us in sudden and pitchy darkness.

I confess to a light creeping of the skin of my face. This may have been due to the chill, clammy air, to my stimulated imagination, or to both. Nobody spoke, and so still were the others that I had no difficulty in doing what in fact I was already doing—putting myself months back, alone down there, as Esdaile had been alone when he had descended for the jar of orange curaÇao that morning. I seemed to myself to be standing there waiting for a sound of splintering glass, the muffled thud of two falling bodies, the faint murmur of half Chelsea running out of doors. I was conscious that the candle shook in my hand, and suddenly I wanted to relight it. I am not sure that my fingers did not go to my pocket for a match.

But it was another light that irradiated us as we stood waiting there—a soft bright cone that all at once spread down from the ceiling above. Up went my startled eyes as if at some trick of thaumaturgy, some imposition on my credulity. Down as if through a funnel streamed that circular shower of pale brightness, outfanning from its small orifice—the hole in the floor.

The hole in the floor! It was that to which my thoughts, following that instinctive movement of my eyes, turned like a flash. The hole in the floor! With my body still in the cellar, I seemed in some transcendental way to be upstairs at the same time, stooping over that hole as Audrey Cunningham had stooped before me. We seemed to be stooping inherently together, yet at the same time independently, so that, I was able to watch her. I saw her in my imagination pallid and hysterical, putting forth one honeysuckle finger half-way to the hole, and then, seized by a wild and baseless urge to put some torturing fancy to the test, changing her mind and putting forth another finger—the finger that bore her engagement-ring.

"If he does not come before I count a hundred he will not come at all...."

"If I thrust in that finger and anything happens I shall know what to do...."

And then her cry as the ring jammed and the finger was withdrawn without it.

But understand that all this did not take a moment, and that I was still down in the cellar, looking up at that hypnotizing cone of white light.

The glimpse suddenly vanished, and I heard Esdaile's voice. I had not heard him come down.

"Stand back a bit," he said, his hand on my sleeve.

Then it was that my eyes fell on the floor.