of all that had so shaken me and that now kept me wakeful, was to my
excited mind more like a mask than a face. The fancy possessed me
that the man behind it had dissolved away like salt in water, and
that it laughed and sighed, appealed and denounced at the bidding of
beings greater or less than man. 'This is not Michael Robartes at
all: Michael Robartes is dead; dead for ten, for twenty years
perhaps,' I kept repeating to myself. I fell at last into a feverish
sleep, waking up from time to time when we rushed past some little
town, its slated roofs shining with wet, or still lake gleaming in
the cold morning light. I had been too pre-occupied to ask where we
were going, or to notice what tickets Michael Robartes had taken, but
I knew now from the direction of the sun that we were going westward;
and presently I knew also, by the way in which the trees had grown
into the semblance of tattered beggars flying with bent heads towards
the east, that we were approaching the western coast. Then
immediately I saw the sea between the low hills upon the left, its
dull grey broken into white patches and lines.

When we left the train we had still, I found, some way to go, and set
out, buttoning our coats about us, for the wind was bitter and
violent. Michael Robartes was silent, seeming anxious to leave me to
my thoughts; and as we walked between the sea and the rocky side of a
great promontory, I realized with a new perfection what a shock had
been given to all my habits of thought and of feelings, if indeed
some mysterious change had not taken place in the substance of my
mind, for the grey waves, plumed with scudding foam, had grown part
of a teeming, fantastic inner life; and when Michael Robartes pointed
to a square ancient-looking house, with a much smaller and newer
building under its lee, set out on the very end of a dilapidated and
almost deserted pier, and said it was the Temple of the Alchemical