And yet, he felt that if Barton were to utter one more phrase of those that Janet had said and, many, many times since, written to him, the impossible, the unbelievable, would be stark, unassailable fact.

What whim of satirist chance had put him there, what fate for good or evil, they could only conjecture, could not know, could never know; yet there he was, strangest figure in a land that knew only the bizarre, with whom the unbelievable was the normal.