"No. A stranger's. I bent forward to have a better look at him because I couldn't see very clearly, when we drew ahead of the goods train and the reflection vanished."
Had it been anyone but Milsom telling the tale I should have put it down as pure invention, but as I have hinted Milsom possessed peculiar qualities, and I grew still more interested.
"Go on," I said.
"Well, I waited because I knew sooner or later I should get another chance; any cutting or tunnel we passed would do the trick. But up till then I hadn't somehow connected the thing with the girl. It didn't occur to me. I wasn't interested in her and I ain't well up on the science of these phenomena. However, in a little while we boomed into a tunnel and I got all I wanted. It was no one I'd ever seen before, a dark, thin, rather lugubrious-looking bloke. He had his arm through the leather loop thing and his hand was tied up in bandages."
"But do you mean you saw him?" I interrupted.
"No, no; his reflection only. And while I watched he shook his head and smiled (not a very gay effort—sort of twisted) and said something; at least, his lips moved. Of course I looked instinctively at the girl then. She was sitting with her eyes shut and her head leaning back, but what gave me the clue was the fact that her lips moved too. She was talking to the fellow."
My cigar had gone out, and I discovered my brandy was still untouched. I nodded, not because I understood any more clearly, but because I felt that words would break a spell.
"Now my mater—she died a couple of years ago, bless her dear soul—used to belong to a lot of societies that deal with phenomena of various kinds. I don't mean spiritualistic séances and that sort of humbug, but suggestion and telepathy. She used to believe in a thing she called Projection; concentrating will power upon something until the thought becomes more or less a material object—like blowing tobacco smoke into a soap bubble—d'you tumble?"
I didn't, but I nodded again.
He was hopelessly out of my depth, but I remembered spending a few days' leave once with Milsom at his home when we were youngsters, and seeing a black spot against a white wall upon which his mother used to concentrate her mind entirely by way of mental exercise for long periods daily. She was a charming, sympathetic woman and, as far as I could observe, perfectly normal in other respects.