“Great Master,” the voice said, “they are beheading me. All is lost.”

“It would be some comfort,” John Vantine said, rather irritably, when he confided this strange story to me, “to know what was lost. It would have been uncommonly civil of the ‘Great Mogul’ to be a little more definite in his information. If the poor fellow lost his head in my service I am profoundly grateful, of course; but precious little good does it do me. Do you think the Psychical Society would undertake the job of discovering in what part of the universe I am rightfully dubbed the Great Master and that young rascal in the nursery is a prince! Unless they can do something, I’m afraid I shall be a half-starved New York lawyer to the end of the chapter.”

To which I had nothing satisfactory to answer.


Interlude Fourth.

THE RADIATOR.