same sensation I had experienced when I first met Sir Alister Moeran.

As I was slowly mounting the stairs... Throat by the teeth of some wild beast, his breast was horribly mauled and lacerated, and his eyes were wide, staring open, and their expression was awful. He must have died a hideous death and known it!"Again he stopped, but I made no comment, only waited with breathless interest till he went on.
"I called the two men. They came and looked, and for the first time I saw terror written on their faces. Their nostrils quivered as though scenting something; then 'Tiger!' they gasped simultaneously.
One of them said he had heard a stifled scream in the night, but had thought it merely some animal in the jungle. The whole thing was a mystery. How I came to sleep undisturbed through it all, how I escaped the same fate, and why the tiger did not carry off his prey----"
"You are sure it was a tiger?" I put in.
"I think there was no doubt of it," Sir Alister replied. "The Bhils swore the teeth-marks were unmistakable, and not only that, but I saw another case seven years later. The body of a young woman was found in the compound outside my bungalow, done to death in precisely the same way. And several of the natives testified as to there being a tiger in that vicinity, for they had found three or four young goats destroyed in similar fashion."
"Who was the girl?" I asked.
Moeran slowly turned his lucent, amber eyes upon me as he answered. "She was a German, a sort of nursery governess at the English doctor's. He was naturally frightfully upset about it, and a regular panic sprang up in the neighbourhood. The natives got a superstitious scare--thought one of their gods was wroth about something and demanded sacrifice; but the white people were simply out to kill the tiger."
"And did they?" I queried eagerly.
Sir Alister shook his head. "That I can't say, as I left the place very soon afterwards and went up to the mountains."
A long silence followed, during which I stared at him in mute fascination. Then an unaccountable impulse made me say abruptly: "Moeran, how old are you?"
His finely-marked eyebrows went up in surprise at the irrelevance of my question, but he smiled. "Funny you should ask! It so happens that it's my birthday tomorrow. I shall be thirty-five."
"Thirty-five!" I repeated. Then with a shiver I rose from my seat. The room seemed to have turned suddenly cold.
"Come," I said, "let's go to bed." 

Next night at dinner I proposed Sir Alister's health, and we all drank to him and his "bride-to-be." They had that day definitely settled the date of their marriage for two months ahead; Ethne was looking radiant and everyone seemed in the 

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