"Good-night!" he said, and held out his hand to me—a cold hand, but firm and strong in its touch. "You may see and hear strange things in this house," he added, "but it is not your business to take any notice of them. You will be, I hope, properly grateful to me—the man who has saved you, and given you a new lease of life."

"Yes, I shall be grateful," I promised him.

He conducted me to a room in what seemed to be an outlying wing of the house, and left me to my own reflections. In truth, I was too tired to give much time to thought. I slipped off my clothes and got into bed, and was asleep in five minutes.

But I was not destined to sleep well, after all. In the first place, I was troubled most unaccountably by dreams, in which I saw myself going through the most extraordinary adventures, and finally hanging to what seemed to be the roof of Penthouse Prison, with the little old man of the grey hair grinning up at me from the ground below. And through my dreams there appeared always to go the light, quick figure of that girl I had seen in the grounds of the house; and always she went searching for someone. I dreamed at last that she came straight to me, and took me by the arms, and stared at me, and cried out that she had found the man she wanted. And so I sat up in bed in the darkness, struggling with someone very real, who was gripping me.

I almost shrieked, as I rolled out of bed, and tried to disengage myself from the arms of a man who was clinging to me. I contrived to drag him towards the window, where, by the faint light of the stars outside, I saw that it was the man Capper—that seemingly half-witted creature who had been the servant of the dead man.

"What do you want?" I ejaculated.

"I've been dreaming," said Capper.

"Well, what of that?" I demanded testily, "I've been dreaming, too."

"Yes, but not dreams like mine," whispered the old man, looking fearfully over his shoulder. "Tell me, do you think they'll come true?"

"I don't know what they were," I reminded him.

He clutched me by the arm, and stared up in my face. There seemed almost a light of madness in his eyes. "I dreamed that it happened a long time ago—before my head went wrong. I dreamed of a blow struck in the dark; I thought someone (it might have been myself, but I'm not sure even of that)—I dreamed that someone 

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