‘Yes, sir; she told me not to mention it; but I suppose as you asked—’ 

 ‘Oh, that’s all right; never mind; I didn’t ring.’ He stood with face uplifted, thinking. 

 ‘Can I do anything, sir?’ came the faint, nervous question after a long pause. 

 ‘One moment, Ada,’ he called in a loud voice. He took out his pocket-book, sat down, and scribbled a little note. He hardly noticed how changed his handwriting was—the clear round letters crabbed and irregular. 

 ‘Are you there, Ada?’ he called. ‘I am slipping a note beneath the door; just draw back the mat; that’s it. Take it at once, please, to Mr. Critchett’s, and be sure to wait for an answer. Then come back direct to me, up here. I don’t think, Ada, your mistress believes much in Critchett; but I have fully explained what I want. He has made me up many prescriptions. Explain that to his assistant if he is not there. Go at once, and you will be back before she is. I should be so very much obliged, tell him. “Mr Arthur Lawford.”’ 

 The minutes slowly drifted by. He sat quite still in the clear untroubled light, waiting in the silence of the empty house. And for the first time he was confronted with the cold incredible horror of his ordeal. Who would believe, who could believe, that behind this strange and awful, yet how simple mask, lay himself? What test; what heaped-up evidence of identity would break it down? It was all a loathsome ignominy. It was utterly absurd. It was— 

 Suddenly, with a kind of ape-like cunning, he deliberately raised a long lean forefinger and pointed it at the shadowy crystal of the looking-glass. Perhaps he was dead, was really and indeed changed in body, was fated really and indeed to change in soul, into That. ‘It’s that beastly voice again,’ Lawford cried out loud, looking vacantly at his upstretched finger. And then, hand and arm, not too willingly, as it were, obeyed; relaxed and fell to his side. ‘You must keep a tight hold, old man,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Once, once you lose yourself—the least symptom of that—the least symptom, and it’s all up!’ And the fools, the heartless, preposterous fools had brought him one volume! 

 When on earth was Ada coming back? She was lagging on purpose. She was in the conspiracy too. Oh, it should be a lesson to Sheila! Oh, if only daylight would come! ‘What are you going to do—to do—to DO?’ He rose once more and paced his silent cage. To and fro, thinking no more; just using his eyes, compelling them to wander 

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