speak of it at the very instant when I was thinking of something
else, struck me as at least a very singular coincidence.

For a moment I could only stare.

"What I mean is," said Annerly, "do you believe in phantasms of the
dead?"

"Phantasms?" I repeated.

"Yes, phantasms, or if you prefer the word, phanograms, or say if
you will phanogrammatical manifestations, or more simply
psychophantasmal phenomena?"

I looked at Annerly with a keener sense of interest than I had ever
felt in him before. I felt that he was about to deal with events and
experiences of which in the two or three months that I had known him
he had never seen fit to speak.

I wondered now that it had never occurred to me that a man whose hair
at fifty-five was already streaked with grey, must have passed
through some terrible ordeal.

Presently Annerly spoke again.

"Last night I saw Q," he said.

"Good heavens!" I ejaculated. I did not in the least know who Q was,
but it struck me with a thrill of indescribable terror that Annerly
had seen Q. In my own quiet and measured existence such a thing had