CHAPTER III
ONCE, when Armitage was a little boy, he had gone into the country with his father for trout. They had been overtaken by a violent thunderstorm, and a green vivid bolt had riven the sod within a few feet of them. For hours afterward that green streak had intervened whichever way he looked—interfered with his sense of time and place, thrown him into a land of livid unreality, and partially convinced his child's mind that he had been transformed into a mechanical toy whose mechanism he could hear clicking inside.
On the morning following his amazing discovery that the house he was born in had been sold without his knowledge—a morning crisp and full of dazzling sunshine—the memory of that bolt came back to him, bringing with it suggestive compari-
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