erything ready--all gone
away--nobody in there yet."

With our English notions this seems inconceivable, but it proved to be
absolutely true. I went in, expecting to be turned back ignominiously
before I had crossed the hall, but there was positively no one there!
The place was like a City of the Dead. Yet within an hour, a banquet
arranged for about seventy people was to take place! I made the best of
my opportunity, ranged through the numerous bedrooms--with hanging
Japanese blinds shutting them off and each one inscribed with the card
of the special Russian or Greek general who formed part of the suite. At
length I strolled into the dining-room--a long, narrow room--arranged
for the coming festivity (at least sixty to seventy covers were laid),
the flowers arranged on the tablecloth in the pretty, artistic Indian
fashion, all the beautiful glass and silver placed in readiness.

Nothing was wanting but the presence of the guests for whom all this
preparation had been made.

The short Indian twilight was already upon us as I stood there for a
moment, contrasting the dead and almost eerie silence, with the lights
and laughter that would so quickly replace it.

A fireplace was close to me as I stood at the far end of the room,
looking down the whole length of the table. Glancing up, I realised that
the only picture in the room was hung over this fireplace. The picture
in question had no artistic value--the painting was flat and poor; even
the subject did not strike me for the first moment as anything very
remarkable. It was the portrait of a man in the prime of life--about
thirty-five, I should have supposed--with the long whiskers and rather
prim pose of a portrait made by an evidently poor artist, probably
thirty or forty years previous to my visit.

But as I looked again, a curious sensation came over me. In spite of the
painter's failure to convey anything more like a living man than a dead
pressed rose is like a living rose, there was something in the eyes of
the portrait that held me, something that rose triumphant above the
artist's limitations. At the same moment I was conscious of a Presence
behind my back; of _somebody who was looking at the picture with me_; of
somebody who was saying to me (not with the outer, but an inner voice):
"_That is a picture of me, but I am not there--I am here, close to you;
behind your shoulder--I am looking at it with you._"

The impression was so strong that it seemed almos