He chose the first alternative, for the whole room, with its faded gilt mirrors, its album-laden tables, its formal rows of chairs skirting the wainscot, the little mats in front of them, and the beeswaxed floor on which with growing difficulty he maintained a perpendicular position, melted away from about and from under him, letting him sink down, down ... into bottomless, boundless abysses of intangible gray mist....
Out of which, after an interval of a hundred years or three minutes, he emerged sufficiently to say in a husky whisper:
"It's nothing! I'm all——"
And then be swallowed up again. Coming to the surface in another æon or so to ask, with a wince of pain:
"Did the old fellow shoot me in the head? It—hurts like the dickens!"
And to receive the answer in a cool little silvery voice like the playing of a fountain in a mossy basin at the end of a green alley, or the trickle of a brook through lush grasses and forget-me-not beds.
"You knocked the floor with it when you made to fall so suddenly!" Something cool and light touched his aching forehead, and the voice went on again: "It does not bleed, no! but there will certainly be one big bump there!"
"One bump.... Feels like one-and-twenty!" P. C. Breagh muttered, adding, with a heave and struggle that brought him into a sitting posture: "Help me up, whoever you are! ... Not all at once.... Donnerwetter! how giddy I am! Try again in a minute! ... Here! ... Give me hold of your fist!"
The silvery voice said, with a liquid tremble in it that might have been laughter or shyness:
"But I do not comprehend—feesth! Permit that I offer you the hand.... I am so very strong, me!"