'But what are you doing here?' cried a
voice suddenly out of his reverie.

He started up and stretched himself, and taking out the neat little
packet that the maid had brought from the chemist's, he drew up a chair,
and sat down once more in front of the glass. He sighed vacantly, rose
and lifted down from the wall above the fireplace a tinted photograph
of himself that Sheila had had enlarged about twelve years ago. It was
a brighter, younger, hairier, but unmistakably the same dull indolent
Lawford who had ventured into Widderstone churchyard that afternoon. The
cheek was a little plumper, the eyes not quite so full-lidded, the hair
a little more precisely parted, the upper lip graced with a small blonde
moustache. He tilted the portrait into the candlelight, and compared it
with this reflection in the glass of what had come out of Widderstone,
feature with feature, with perfect composure and extreme care, Then he
laid down the massive frame on the table, and gazed quietly at the tiny
packet.

It was to be a day of queer experiences. He had never before realized
with how many miracles mere everyday life is besieged. Here in this
small punctilious packet lay a Sesame--a power of transformation beside
which the transformation of that rather flaccid face of the noonday into
this tense, sinister face of midnight was but as a moving from house
to house--a change just as irrevocable and complete, and yet so very
normal. Which should it be, that, or--his face lifted itself once more
to the ice-like gloom of the looking-glass-that, or this?

It simply gazed back with a kind of quizzical pity on its lean features
under the scrutiny of eyes so deep, so meaningful, so desolate, and yet
so indomitably courageous. In the brain behind them a slow and stolid
argument was in progress; the one baffling reply on the one side to
every appeal on the other being still simply. 'What dreams may come?'

Those eyes surely knew something of dreams, else, why this violent and
stubborn endeavour to keep awake.

Lawford did indeed once actually frame the question, 'But who the
devil are you?' And it really seemed the eyes perceptibly widened or
brightened. The mere vexation of his unparalleled position. Sheila's
pathetic incredulity, his old vicar's laborious kindness, the tiresome
network of experience into which he would be dragged struggling on the
morrow, and on the morrow after that, and after that--the thought of
all these things fade