vanished. It seemed to the dreamer that he kissed the girl, but of this he could not be sure; for the vision dispersed into fragments, and he finally fell into the deep slumber of the worn-out.

When he awoke it was daylight, and from the position of a faint gleam of sunshine, breaking through the still clinging mists, he guessed that it was nine o'clock. But Herries cast no second look through the window, when he saw what lay on the patchwork quilt. Thereon appeared a white bone-handled razor crimson with blood, and he found that one sleeve of his woollen shirt was likewise stained red.

 

 

 

 

 CHAPTER II

A RECOGNITION

 

After that first startled look, Herries sprang from the bed, anxious only, for the moment, to avoid contact with that blood-stained razor. But blood also smeared the right arm of his shirt, which he could not part with, as he had no other to wear. His hands were clean, the bed-quilt was smooth, and the door closed. He could not comprehend how the razor and the blood-stains came to be there. Half dazed and unable to grasp the meaning of these weird things, he flung open the window. It looked down into a small, bleak garden, and into thick white mists, behind which lay those weary marshes he had traversed on the previous evening. The inn might have been in the Aristophanic Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, for all the signs of earth-life that were visible in those dismal fogs. Herries, craning his body half out of the window, could hear men and women chattering in the street, and at times the shrill babble of children. So far as he could see and hear, nothing was wrong, yet he felt that something terrible had happened. It was at this point that he retreated suddenly from the window, with one awesome word beating insistently upon his confused brain.

"Murder!" he cried aloud in the empty room. "Murder!"

He sprang towards the door, clothed only in his 

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