Meanwhile, as the talk continued, and the wings of imaginative speculation fanned the thick tobacco smoke, others had dropped in, both male and female members, and the group now filled the little room to the walls. The same magnet drew them all, in each heart burned the same huge question mark: Who—what—is this LeVallon? What was the meaning of the scene in Khilkoff's Studio?
Here, too, was a curious and significant fact about the gathering—the amount of knowledge, true or otherwise, they had managed to collect about LeVallon. One way or another, no one could say exactly how, the Society had picked up an astonishing array of detail they now shared together. It was known where he had spent his youth, also how, and with whom, as well as something of the different views about him held by Dr. Devonham and Edward Fillery. To such temperaments as theirs the strange, the unusual, came automatically perhaps, percolating into their minds as though a collective power of thought-reading operated. Garbled, fanciful, askew, their information may have been, but a great deal of it was not far wrong.
Imson, for instance, provided an account of LeVallon's birth, to which all listened spellbound. He evaded all questions as to how he knew of it. "His parents," he assured the room, "practised the old forgotten magic; his father, at any rate, was an expert, if not an initiate, with all the rites and formulæ of ancient times in his memory. LeVallon was born as the result of an experiment, its origins dating back so far that they concerned life upon another planet, I believe, a planet nearer to the sun. The tremendous winds and heat were vehicles of deity, you see—there."
"The parents, you mean, had former lives upon another planet?" asked someone in a hushed tone. "Or he himself?"
"The parents—and Mason. Mason was involved in the experiment that resulted in the birth of LeVallon here to-day."
"The experiment—what was it exactly?" inquired Lattimer, while Toogood surreptitiously made notes on his rather dirty cuff.
Imson shrugged his shoulders very slightly.
"Some of it came to me in sleep," he mentioned, producing a paper from his pocket and beginning to read it aloud before anyone could stop him.
"When the sun was younger, and moon and stars