Hon. Sir Arthur Roden Mixing his Metaphors in the Cause of Empire"--it now hangs in the library of Cadogan Square--rescued the conversation from controversial destruction. In lieu of politics we had to arrange for the arrival of our last two guests; Aintree had wired that he was coming by a later train, and Rawnsley's sister Mavis had to be brought over some twenty miles from Hanningfold on the Sussex borders. Sylvia volunteered for the longer journey in her own little runabout, while the Seraph was to be fetched in the car that went nightly to Brandon Junction for Arthur's official, cabinet-minister's despatch case.

"What's come over our Seraph the last few years?" Culling asked me, when the two cars had gone their respective ways and we were smoking a cheroot in the Dutch Garden. "I've known him from a bit of a boy that high, and now--God knows--it's in a decline you'd say he was taken.

You can't please him and you can't even anger him. He's like a man has his heart broken."

I did not know what answer to give.

"Just a passing mood," I suggested.

"It's a mood will have him destroyed," said Culling, gloomily.

He was a kind-hearted, pleasant, superficial fellow, one of those feckless, humorous Irishmen who laugh at the absurdities of the world and themselves, and go on laughing till life comes to hold no other business--a splendid engine for work or fighting, but too idle almost to make a start, too little concentrated ever to keep the wheel moving, a man of short cuts and golden roads.... He talked with easy kindness of the Seraph till a horn sounded far away down the drive and the Brandon car swept tortuously through the elm avenue to the house.

"A common drunk and disorderly!" Culling shouted as the Seraph came towards us with his right arm in a sling. He had that morning shut his thumb in the front door of his flat, and while we dragged the depths of Waterloo for his body, he had been sitting with his doctor, sick and faint, having the wound dressed. His face was whiter than usual, and his manner restless.

"I've kept my promise," he remarked to me.

"I was giving up hope."

"I _had_ to come," he answered in vague perplexity, and relapsed into one of his longest silences.

We wandered for an hour through the grand old-world gardens, reverently worshipping their many-coloured spring splendour. Flaming masses of azaleas blazed forth from a background of white and mauve rhododendrons; white, grey, and purple lilac squandered their wealth in riotous display, while the Golden Rain flashed in the evening sun, and a scented breeze spread the grass walks with a yellow carpet. We drew a last luxurious deep breath, and turned to watch the nymphaeas closing their eyes for the night.

Beyond the water garden, in an orchard deep with fallen apple-blossom, Rawnsley and Gartside were stretched in wicker chairs watching an old spaniel race across the grass in sheer exhilaration of spirit.

"Come and study the Sixth Sense," Gartside called out as we approached.

"There isn't such a thing, but there's no harm in your studying it,"

said Rawnsley, in a tone that indicated it mattered little what any of us did to improve or debase our minds.

"Martel!" The dog bounded up at Gartside's call, and he showed us two glazed, sightless eyes. "Good dog!" He patted the animal's neck, and Martel raced away to the far end of the orchard. "That dog's as blind as my boot, but he steers himself as though he'd eyes all over his head. By Jove! I thought he'd brained himself that time!"

Martel had raced at top speed to the foot of a gnarled apple tree. At two yards' distance he swerved as though a whip had struck him, and passed into safety. The same thing happened half a dozen times in as many minutes.

"He _knows_ it's there," said Gartside. "He's got a sense of distance.

If that isn't a sixth sense, what is it?"

"Intensified smell-sense," Rawnsley pronounced. "If _you_ were blind, you'd find your smelling and hearing intensified."

"Not enough," said Gartside.

"It's all you'll get. A sense is the perceptiveness of an organ.

You've eyes, ears, a nose, a palate, and a number of sensitive surfaces. If you want a sixth sense, you must have a sixth perceive organ. You haven't. Therefore you must be content with seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching."

Gartside was not satisfied with the narrow category.

"I know a man who can always tell when there's a cat in the room."

"Before or after seeing it?" Rawnsley inquired politely.

"Oh, before. Genuine case. I tested him by locking a cat in the sideboard once when he was coming to dine with me. He complained the moment he got into the room."

"Acute smell-sense," Rawnsley decided.

"You hear of people who can foretell a change in the weather,"

Gartside went on.

"Usually wrong," said Rawnsley. "When they're right, and it isn't coincidence, you can trace it to the influence of a changed atmosphere on a sensitive part of their body. An old wound, for instance. Acute touch sense."

I happened to catch sight of the Seraph lying on his face piling the fallen apple-blossoms into little heaps.

"What about a sense of futurity?" I asked.

"Did you ever meet the man could spot a Derby winner?" asked Culling, infected by Rawnsley's scepticism.

"Futurity in respect of yourself," I defined. "What's called 'premonition.'"

Rawnsley demolished me with patient weightiness.

"You come down to breakfast with a headache...."

"Owin' to the unwisdom of mixin' your drinks," Culling interposed.

"...Everything's black. In the course of the day you hear a friend's dead. 'Ah!' you say, 'I knew something was going to happen.' What about all those other mornings...."

"Terribly plentiful!" said Culling.

"...When everything's black and nothing happens? It's pure coincidence."

I defined my meaning yet more narrowly.

"I have in mind the premonition of something quite definite."

"For instance?"

I told him of a phenomenon that has frequently come under my observation in the East--the power possessed by many natives of foretelling the exact hour of their death. Quite recently I came across a case in the Troad where I fell in with a young Greek who had been wasting for months with some permanent, indefinable fever. One morning I found him sitting dressed in his library, the temperature was normal and the pulse regular; he seemed in perfect health. I congratulated him on his recovery, and was informed that he would die punctually at eight that evening.

In the course of the day his will was drawn up and signed, the relatives took their farewells, and a priest administered supreme unction. I called again at seven o'clock. He seemed still in perfect health and full possession of his faculties, but repeated his assertion that he would pass away at eight. I told him not to be morbid. At ten minutes to eight he warned me that his time was at hand; after another three minutes he undressed and lay motionless on his bed. At two minutes past eight the heart had ceased to beat.

"Auto-hypnosis," said Rawnsley when I had done. "A long debilitating illness in which the mind became more and more abnormal and subject to fancies. An idea--from a dream, perhaps--that death will take place at a certain hour. The mind becomes obsessed by that idea until the body is literally done to death. It's no more premonition than if I say I'm going to dine to-night between eight and nine. I've an idea I shall, I shall do my best to make that idea fruitful, and nothing but an unforeseen eventuality will prevent my premonition coming true. Stick to the five senses and three dimensions, Merivale. And now come and dress, or I may not get my dinner after all."

"I think Rawnsley's disposed of premonitions," said the Seraph from the grass. Possibly I was the only one who detected a note of irony in his voice.

We had been given adjoining rooms, and in the course of dressing I had a visit from him with the request that I should tie his tie.

"Choose the other hand next time," I advised him, when I had done my bad best. "Authors and pianists, you know--it's your livelihood."

"It'll be well enough by the time I've anything to write."

"Is your Miserable Child causing trouble?"