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“Come and have a pipe before you turn in,” Winterman had said; and they had sat on together till midnight, with the door of the bungalow open on a heaving moonlit bay, and summer insects bumping against the chimney of the lamp. Winterman had just bent down to re-fill his pipe from the jar on the table, and Bernald, jerking about to catch him in the yellow circle of lamplight, sat speechless, staring at a fact that seemed suddenly to have substituted itself for Winterman’s face, or rather to have taken on its features.

“No, they never saw that Pellerin’s ideas were Pellerin. …” He continued to stare at Winterman. “Just as this man’s ideas are–why, are Pellerin!”

The thought uttered itself in a kind of inner shout, and Bernald started upright with the violent impact of his conclusion. Again and again in the last forty-eight hours he had exclaimed to himself: “This is as good as Pellerin.” Why hadn’t he said till now: “This is Pellerin”? … Surprising as the answer was, he had no choice but to take it. He hadn’t said so simply because Winterman was better than Pellerin–that there was so much more of him, so to speak. Yes; but–it came to Bernald in a flash–wouldn’t there by this time have been any amount more of Pellerin? … The young man felt actually dizzy with the thought. That was it–there was the solution of the haunting problem! This man was Pellerin, and more than Pellerin! It was so fantastic and yet so unanswerable that he burst into a sudden startled laugh.

Winterman, at the same moment, brought his palm down with a sudden crash on the pile of manuscript covering the desk.

“What’s the matter?” Bernald gasped.

“My match wasn’t out. In another minute the destruction of the library of Alexandria would have been a trifle compared to what you’d have seen.” Winterman, with his large deep laugh, shook out the smouldering sheets. “And I should have been a pensioner on Doctor Bob the Lord knows how much longer!”

Bernald pulled himself together. “You’ve really got going again? The thing’s actually getting into shape?”

“This particular thing is in shape. I drove at it hard all last week, thinking our friend’s brother would be down on Sunday, and might look it over.”

Bernald had to repress the tendency to another wild laugh.

“Howland–you meant to show Howland what you’ve done?”

Winterman, looming against the moonlight, slowly turned a dusky shaggy head toward him.

“Isn’t it a good thing to do?”

Bernald wavered, torn between loyalty to his friends and the grotesqueness of answering in the affirmative. After all, it was none of his business to furnish Winterman with an estimate of Howland Wade.

“Well, you see, you’ve never told me what your line is,” he answered, temporizing.

“No, because nobody’s ever told me. It’s exactly what I want to find out,” said the other genially.

“And you expect Wade–?”

“Why, I gathered from our good Doctor that it’s his trade. Doesn’t he explain–interpret?”

“In his own domain–which is Pellerinism.”

Winterman gazed out musingly upon the moon-touched dusk of waters. “And what is Pellerinism?” he asked.

Bernald sprang to his feet with a cry. “Ah, I don’t know–but you’re Pellerin!”

They stood for a minute facing each other, among the uncertain swaying shadows of the room, with the sea breathing through it as something immense and inarticulate breathed through young Bernald’s thoughts; then Winterman threw up his arms with a humorous gesture.

“Don’t shoot!” he said.

IV

DAWN found them there, and the risen sun laid its beams on the rough floor of the bungalow, before either of the men was conscious of the passage of time. Bernald, vaguely trying to define his own state in retrospect, could only phrase it: “I floated … floated. …”

The gist of fact at the core of the extraordinary experience was simply that John Pellerin, twenty-five years earlier, had voluntarily disappeared, causing the rumour of his death to be reported to an inattentive world; and that now he had come back to see what that world had made of him.