THE FOURTH SITTING They turned the light off and sat down in silence.

Then Julian said: "Keep your hands well away from mine, Val." "I will." They had not been sitting for five minutes before Valentine felt that the atmosphere was becoming impregnated with a certain heaviness of mystery, with a certain steady and unyielding dreariness hanging round them like a cloud.

They were once again confronted by a strange reality.

Surely they were.

Valentine felt it, silently knew it.
In this blackness he seemed at length to step forward and to stand upon the very threshold of an abyss, beyond which, in vague vapours, lay things unknown, creatures unsuspected hitherto.