“Don’t talk ridiculous rubbish.”
“I beg your pardon—I am only stating a fact.”
“I won’t listen to it,” snapped the Doctor, showing downright temper. “You’re a good one—there’s no doubt on that score—you beat the deck! But when you try to stuff me with that Mars business, you go a shade too far.”
“As you did when you opened my letter and exposed my secret, sir. You have brought this on yourself.”
“By gracious, he has you there, Doctor!” put in Maurice, rousing himself from the reverie into which he had fallen.
“Not that I blame you,” continued Mr. Mirrikh; “under similar circumstances no doubt I would have done just as you did; but when you utterly discredit my statements”
“Stuff and nonsense! Do you expect a man of my intelligence to believe that a human body can be transported from one planet to another?”
“No, sir. I do not expect it.”
“Then why say it?”
“I did not say it.”
“What am I to understand by that, when you most assuredly did?”
“You may understand whatever you please. The fact remains that to transport a human body from the planet Mars to this earth is quite impossible, as you say.”
“Yet you claim that on Mars it is customary to have faces like yours. You assert that you are a man from Mars.”
“Yes.”
“First you speak one way and then another.”
“I speak consistently, my friend. I was born in Mars, but this body which you see never left this earth, of course.”
“Oh, pshaw! Now we are getting at it,” sneered Philpot. “Some rubbishing re-incarnation nonsense. I thought as much.”
Then it was that he said it—spoke the words which turned the whole tide of my life.
“It is nothing of the sort,” he began, fixing his eyes on Maurice in a way that I have seen Hindu snake charmers fix theirs upon the deadly cobra. “My claim is that while your soul is fast to your body, I can as easily take my soul out of my body as you can pull your hand out of a glove or your foot out of a boot. When I told you that I was a man from Mars I stated the truth; when I told you that I was going to return to that planet and would be pleased to take
