g
it down and strode to the bed, and rang the bell. Then suddenly
recollecting himself, he paused and listened. There came a tap on the
door. 'Is that you, Sheila?' he called, doubtfully.

'No, sir, it's me,' came the answer.

'Oh, don't trouble; I only wanted to speak to your mistress. It's all
right.'

'Mrs. Lawford has gone out, sir,' replied the voice.

'Gone out?'

'Yes, sir; she told me not to mention it; but I suppose as you asked--'

'Oh, that's all right; never mind; I didn't ring.' He stood with face
uplifted, thinking.

'Can I do anything, sir?' came the faint, nervous question after a long
pause.

'One moment, Ada,' he called in a loud voice. He took out his
pocket-book, sat down, and scribbled a little note. He hardly noticed
how changed his handwriting was--the clear round letters crabbed and
irregular.

'Are you there, Ada?' he called. 'I am slipping a note beneath the
door; just draw back the mat; that's it. Take it at once, please, to Mr.
Critchett's, and be sure to wait for an answer. Then come back direct
to me, up here. I don't think, Ada, your mistress believes much in
Critchett; but I have fully explained what I want. He has made me up
many prescriptions. Explain that to his assistant if he is not there.
Go at once, and you will be back before she is. I should be so very much
obliged, tell him. "Mr Arthur Lawford."'

The minutes slowly drifted by. He sat quite still in the clear
untroubled light, waiting in the silence of the empty house. And for
the first time he was confronted with the cold incredible horror of his
ordeal. Who would believe, who could believe, that behind this strange
and awful, yet how simple mask, lay himself? What test; what heaped-up
evidence of identity would break it down? It was all a loathsome
ignominy. It was utterly absurd. It was--

Suddenly, with a kind of ape-like cunning, he deliberately raised a
long lean forefinger and pointed it at the shadowy crystal of the
looking-glass. Perhaps he was dead, was really and indeed changed in
body, was fated really and indeed to change in soul, into That. 'It's
that beastly voice again,' Lawford cried out loud, looking vacantly at
his upstretched finger. And then, hand and arm, not too willingly, as it
were, obeyed; relaxed and fell to his side. 'You must keep a tight hold,
old man,' he muttered to himself. 'Once, once you lose yourself--the
least symptom of that--the least symptom, and it's all up!' And the
fools