g what went on in the glass of his grandmother's portrait,
continued to play his part. He felt for his dangling watch and began
slowly to wind it up. Then, for a moment ceasing to watch, he began to
empty his trousers pockets and to place methodically in a little row on
the mantelpiece the pennies and halfpennies he took from them. The
sweeping, minutely electric noise filled the whole bedroom, and had
Oleron altered his point of observation he could have brought the dim
gleam of the moving comb so into position that it would almost have
outlined his grandmother's head.

Any other head of which it might have been following the outline was
invisible.

Oleron finished the emptying of his pockets; then, under cover of another
simulated yawn, not so much summoning his resolution as overmastered by
an exhorbitant curiosity, he swung suddenly round. That which was being
combed was still not to be seen, but the comb did not stop. It had
altered its angle a little, and had moved a little to the left. It was
passing, in fairly regular sweeps, from a point rather more than five
feet from the ground, in a direction roughly vertical, to another point a
few inches below the level of the chest of drawers.

Oleron continued to act to admiration. He walked to his little washstand
in the corner, poured out water, and began to wash his hands. He removed
his waistcoat, and continued his preparations for bed. The combing did
not cease, and he stood for a moment in thought. Again his eyes twinkled.
The next was very cunning--

"Hm!... _I think I'll read for a quarter of an hour_," he said aloud....

He passed out of the room.

He was away a couple of minutes; when he returned again the room was
suddenly quiet. He glanced at the chest of drawers; the comb lay still,
between the collar he had removed and a pair of gloves. Without
hesitation Oleron put out his hand and picked it up. It was an ordinary
eighteenpenny comb, taken from a card in a chemist's shop, of a substance
of a definite specific gravity, and no more capable of rebellion against
the Laws by which it existed than are the worlds that keep their orbits
through the void. Oleron put it down again; then he glanced at the bundle
of papers he held in his hand. What he had gone to fetch had been the
fifteen chapters of the original _Romilly_.

"Hm!" he muttered as he threw the manuscript into a chair.... "As I
thought.... She's just blindly, ragingly, murderously jealous."