.

THE EXPOSURE.
SUCH were the six men who had sworn to destroy the world.

Again and again Syme strove to pull together his common sense in their presence.
Sometimes he saw for an instant that these notions were subjective, that he was only looking at ordinary men, one of whom was old, another nervous, another short-sighted.

The sense of an unnatural symbolism always settled back on him again.

Each figure seemed to be, somehow, on the borderland of things, just as their theory was on the borderland of thought.