es on
Marcus Harding.' I was in a condition of fierce excitement--"

"Ah, exactly," muttered the professor, almost as if consoled--"fierce
excitement!"

"I could not think of sleep. For a long time I remained in here,
sitting, standing, pacing, opening books; I scarcely know what I did
or did not do. At last a sensation of terrible exhaustion crept over me.
I undressed. I threw myself on my bed. I tried to sleep. I turned,
shifted, got up, let in more air, again lay down, lay resolutely still
in the dark, tried not to think. But always my mind dwelt on that matter.
In those few frightful moments what had become of myself, of Henry
Chichester? Had the powerful personality of that man whom once I had
almost worshiped thrust him away, submerged him, stricken him down in a
sort of deathlike trance? What I had seen I remembered now as Henry
Chichester. What I had known in those moments I still knew now as Henry
Chichester. In vain I revolved this matter in my feverish mind. It was
too much for me. I was in deep waters.

"I closed my eyes. The fatigue wrapped me more closely. Sleep at last was
surely drawing near. But suddenly I knew--how I cannot exactly say--that
once more the shutter was to be drawn back for me. This knowledge
resembled a horrible physical sensation. The entry of it into my mind, or
indeed into my very soul, was as the dawning of a dreadful and unnatural
pain in the body. This pain increased till it became agony. Although I
still lay motionless, I felt like one involved in a furious struggle in
which the whole sum of me took violent part. And there came to me the
simile of a man seized by tremendous hands, and held before a window
opening into a room in which something frightful was about to take place.
And the shutter slipped back from the window.

"Again I looked upon myself. That was my exact sensation. The shutter
drawn back, I assisted at the spectacle of Marcus Harding's life. And it
was my life. I knew with such frightful intimacy that my knowledge was as
vision. Therefore, I say, I saw. Not only my spirit seemed to be gazing,
but also my bodily eyes.

"I saw myself in the night slowly approaching my house in Onslow Gardens,
ashen pale, shaken, terrified. At a corner I passed a policeman. He knew
me and saluted me with respect. I made no gesture in response. He stared
at me in surprise. Then a smile came into his face--the smile of a man
who is suddenly able to think much less of another than h