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“So there may be excitement, after all?”

John Silence waited a moment before he replied.

“Something very serious is amiss there,” he said gravely, at length. “Some one–not himself, I gather,–has been meddling with a rather dangerous kind of gunpowder. So–yes, there may be excitement, as you put it.”

“And my duties?” I asked, with a decidedly growing interest. “Remember, I am your ‘assistant.'”

“Behave like an intelligent confidential secretary. Observe everything, without seeming to. Say nothing–nothing that means anything. Be present at all interviews. I may ask a good deal of you, for if my impressions are correct this is–“

He broke off suddenly.

“But I won’t tell you my impressions yet,” he resumed after a moment’s thought. “Just watch and listen as the case proceeds. Form your own impressions and cultivate your intuitions. We come as ordinary visitors, of course,” he added, a twinkle showing for an instant in his eye; “hence, the guns.”

Though disappointed not to hear more, I recognised the wisdom of his words and knew how valueless my impressions would be once the powerful suggestion of having heard his own lay behind them. I likewise reflected that intuition joined to a sense of humour was of more use to a man than double the quantity of mere “brains,” as such.

Before putting the letter away, however, he handed it back, telling me to place it against my forehead for a few moments and then describe any pictures that came spontaneously into my mind.

“Don’t deliberately look for anything. Just imagine you see the inside of the eyelid, and wait for pictures that rise against its dark screen.”

I followed his instructions, making my mind as nearly blank as possible. But no visions came. I saw nothing but the lines of light that pass to and fro like the changes of a kaleidoscope across the blackness. A momentary sensation of warmth came and went curiously.

“You see–what?” he asked presently.

“Nothing,” I was obliged to admit disappointedly; “nothing but the usual flashes of light one always sees. Only, perhaps, they are more vivid than usual.”

He said nothing by way of comment or reply.

“And they group themselves now and then,” I continued, with painful candour, for I longed to see the pictures he had spoken of, “group themselves into globes and round balls of fire, and the lines that flash about sometimes look like triangles and crosses–almost like geometrical figures. Nothing more.”

I opened my eyes again, and gave him back the letter.

“It makes my head hot,” I said, feeling somehow unworthy for not seeing anything of interest. But the look in his eyes arrested my attention at once.

“That sensation of heat is important,” he said significantly.

“It was certainly real, and rather uncomfortable,” I replied, hoping he would expand and explain. “There was a distinct feeling of warmth–internal warmth somewhere–oppressive in a sense.”

“That is interesting,” he remarked, putting the letter back in his pocket, and settling himself in the corner with newspapers and books. He vouchsafed nothing more, and I knew the uselessness of trying to make him talk. Following his example I settled likewise with magazines into my corner. But when I closed my eyes again to look for the flashing lights and the sensation of heat, I found nothing but the usual phantasmagoria of the day’s events–faces, scenes, memories,–and in due course I fell asleep and then saw nothing at all of any kind.

When we left the train, after six hours’ travelling, at a little wayside station standing without trees in a world of sand and heather, the late October shadows had already dropped their sombre veil upon the landscape, and the sun dipped almost out of sight behind the moorland hills. In a high dogcart, behind a fast horse, we were soon rattling across the undulating stretches of an open and bleak country, the keen air stinging our cheeks and the scents of pine and bracken strong about us. Bare hills were faintly visible against the horizon, and the coachman pointed to a bank of distant shadows on our left where he told us the sea lay. Occasional stone farmhouses, standing back from the road among straggling fir trees, and large black barns that seemed to shift past us with a movement of their own in the gloom, were the only signs of humanity and civilisation that we saw, until at the end of a bracing five miles the lights of the lodge gates flared before us and we plunged into a thick grove of pine trees that concealed the Manor House up to the moment of actual arrival.