t between the sheets, and began to think over names. He turned on his
right side and fell asleep again.

He was not to sleep restfully that night. He waked again, but very
slowly, and without any movement of his body. He lay with his face
towards the door, dreamily considering that the landlord, for all his
pride in his new paint, had employed a bad workman who had left a black
strip of the door unpainted,--a fairly wide strip, too, which his host
should never have overlooked.

Wogan was lazily determining to speak to the landlord about it when his
half-awakened mind was diverted by a curious phenomenon, a delusion of
the eyes such as he had known to have befallen him before when he had
stared for a long while on any particular object: the strip of black
widened and widened. Wogan waited for it to contract, as it would be
sure to do. But it did not contract, and--so Wogan waked up completely.

He waked up with a shock of the heart, with all his senses startled and
strained. But he had been gradually waking before, and so by neither
movement nor cry did he betray that he was awake. He had not locked the
door of his room; that widening strip of black ran vertically down from
the lintel to the ground and between the white door and the white door
frame. The door was being cautiously pushed open; the strip of black was
the darkness of the passage coming through.

Wogan slid his hand beneath his pillow, and drew the knife from its
sheath as silently as the door opened. The strip of black ceased to
widen, there was a slight scuffling sound upon the floor which Wogan was
at no loss to understand. It was the sound of a man crawling into the
room upon his hands and knees.

Wogan lay on his side and felt grateful to his host,--an admirable
man,--for he had painted his door white, and now he crawled through it
on his hands and knees. No doubt he would crawl to the side of the bed;
he did. To feel, no doubt, for Mr. Wogan's coat and breeches and any
little letter which might be hiding in the pockets. But here Wogan was
wrong. For he saw a dark thing suddenly on the counterpane at the edge
of the bed. The dark thing travelled upwards very softly; it had four
fingers and a thumb. It was, no doubt, travelling towards the pillow,
and as soon as it got there--but Wogan watching that hand beneath his
dosed eyelids had again to admit that he was wrong. It did not travel
towards the pillow; to his astonishment it stole across towards hi