believe, not a word. But it was the first time he had come across that sort of lunacy, and it shocked him. "What! The Dead?"
Mr. Higginson nodded twice with fixed lips and far-away eyes.
"There is proof," he said, and was gone.
****
Garden stared after him, then he shrugged his shoulders, muttered, "Mad as a hatter!" and turned to go his way. It was about five o'clock.
****
Among other things which the Devil had done in that period with which this story deals was the planting in Ormeston of a certain servant of his, by name George Babcock.
George Babcock had come to Ormeston after a curious and ill-explained, a short and a decisive episode in his life. He had begun as a young theorist, who had startled Europe from the foreign University where he was studying by a thesis now forgotten abroad, but one the memory of which still lingered in England, for a paper had boomed it.
It had been a scornful and triumphant refutation of the Hypnotists of Nancy.
