"Yes," interrupted Povey audaciously, "but the experiment you were telling us about——?"
A murmur of approving voices helped him.
"Oh, the experiment, yes, well—all I know is," he went on with conviction, calmly replacing the poem in his pocket, "that it concerned an old rite, involving the evocation of some elemental being or nature-spirit the three of them had already evoked millions of years before, but had not banished again. The experiment they made to-day was to restore it to its proper sphere. In order to do so, they had to evoke it again, and, of course"—he glanced round, as though all present were familiar with the formula of magical practices—"it could come only through the channel of a human system."
"Of course, yes," murmured a dozen voices, while eyes grew bigger and a pin dropping must have been audible.
"Well"—Imson spoke very slowly now, each word clear as a bell—"the father, who was officiating, failed. He could not stand the strain. His heart stopped beating. He died—just when it was there, he dropped dead."
"What happened to it?" asked Povey, too interested to care that he no longer led the room. "You said it could only use a human system as channel——"
"It did so," explained Imson.
The information produced a pause of several seconds. Some of the members, like Toogood, though openly, were making pencil notes upon cuffs or backs of envelopes.
"But the channel was neither Mason nor the woman." The effect of this negative information was as nothing compared to the startling interest produced by the speaker's next words: "It took the easiest channel, the line of least resistance—the unborn body of the child."
Povey, seizing his opportunity, leaped into the silence: