that very chair, and told his story, Clarke had interrupted him
at a point a little subsequent to this, had cut short his words
in a paroxysm of horror. "My God!" he had exclaimed, "think,
think what you are saying. It is too incredible, too
monstrous; such things can never be in this quiet world, where
men and women live and die, and struggle, and conquer, or maybe
fail, and fall down under sorrow, and grieve and suffer strange
fortunes for many a year; but not this, Phillips, not such
things as this. There must be some explanation, some way out
of the terror. Why, man, if such a case were possible, our
earth would be a nightmare."

But Phillips had told his story to the end, concluding:

"Her flight remains a mystery to this day; she vanished
in broad sunlight; they saw her walking in a meadow, and a few
moments later she was not there."

Clarke tried to conceive the thing again, as he sat by
the fire, and again his mind shuddered and shrank back,
appalled before the sight of such awful, unspeakable elements
enthroned as it were, and triumphant in human flesh. Before
him stretched the long dim vista of the green causeway in the
forest, as his friend had described it; he saw the swaying
leaves and the quivering shadows on the grass, he saw the
sunlight and the flowers, and far away, far in the long
distance, the two figure moved toward him. One was Rachel, but
the other?

Clarke had tried his best to disbelieve it all, but at