sympathy with his coming to me: it seems to you either nonsense or something very dangerous. But I know you have sympathy with the result of it."
Suddenly his explanation of the voices she had heard last night occurred to him.
"When you told me this morning that you had heard talking in my room," he said, "I did not mean to tell you about Martin, and so I invented something—oh yes, that I had been reading aloud what I had written, to account for it. It wasn't true, but I had to tell some fib. And did you really hear conversation going on? That's awfully interesting."
"I thought I did," said she. "And there was knocking or hammering. Did you invent something about that too?"
"Oh yes," said Archie. "But I don't really know what the knocking was. As I was going off into trance, I heard loud knocking of some sort, but I didn't let it disturb the oncoming of the trance. It deepened, and then Martin came, and I talked with him and saw him."
"Oh Archie, how do you know it was he?" she cried, wildly enough, hardly knowing what she meant, but speaking from the dictate of some nightmare that screamed and struggled in her mind.
"Why, of course it was he," said Archie. "I recognized him, superficially, that is to say, from my knowledge of my own face, just as I recognized the photograph in the cache at Grives from its likeness to me. But I know it was he in some far more essential and inward manner. It was Martin."
"Will he come again?" asked the girl.
"I hope so, many times. Indeed, he promised to. I needed him, he got permission to come to me in my need. Is he not ministering to it? Haven't you seen the immense change in me?"
Undeniably she had seen that, and for a moment a little pang of human disappointment came over her.
