e faint and irregular. But these smaller signs
of disturbance were as nothing compared with the feeling I had--though
no outward signs bore testimony to the fact--that I had narrowly escaped
a real and ghastly catastrophe. I felt shaken, somehow, shaken to the
very roots of my being."

The doctor rose from his chair and crossed over to the dying fire, so
that no one could see the expression on his face as he stood with his
back to the grate, and continued his weird tale.

"It would be wearisome," he went on in a lower voice, looking over our
heads as though he still saw the dingy top floor of that haunted
Edinburgh lodging-house; "it would be tedious for me at this length of
time to analyse my feelings, or attempt to reproduce for you the
thorough examination to which I endeavoured then to subject my whole
being, intellectual, emotional, and physical. I need only mention the
dominant emotion with which this curious episode left me--the indignant
anger against myself that I could ever have lost my self-control enough
to come under the sway of so gross and absurd a delusion. This protest,
however, I remember making with all the emphasis possible. And I also
remember noting that it brought me very little satisfaction, for it was
the protest of my reason only, when all the rest of my being was up in
arms against its conclusions.

"My dealings with the 'delusion,' however, were not yet over for the
night; for very early next morning, somewhere about three o'clock, I was
awakened by a curiously stealthy noise in the room, and the next minute
there followed a crash as if all my books had been swept bodily from
their shelf on to the floor.

"But this time I was not frightened. Cursing the disturbance with all
the resounding and harmless words I could accumulate, I jumped out of
bed and lit the candle in a second, and in the first dazzle of the
flaring match--but before the wick had time to catch--I was certain I
_saw_ a dark grey shadow, of ungainly shape, and with something more or
less like a human head, drive rapidly past the side of the wall farthest
from me and disappear into the gloom by the angle of the door.

"I waited one single second to be sure the candle was alight, and then
dashed after it, but before I had gone two steps, my foot stumbled
against something hard piled up on the carpet and I only just saved
myself from falling headlong. I picked myself up and found that all the
books from what I called my 'lang