silently, while the hand that held the
steel pointed at the sleeping man in diabolical menace.

"And so the huge form and the bloated yellow face seemed to fade away
while I watched.

"The express rushed and roared through the blinding darkness without;
the sleeping man slept on still; till suddenly a strong light fell full
upon him, and he woke.

"And then I saw why I had been so certain that I knew him. For as he
lifted his head, I saw his face in the strong light.

"_And the face was my own face; and the sleeper was myself!_"

Paul Devereux made a pause in his queer story here. Except when he had
spoken of the girl, he had spoken in his usual cool, hard way. The pipe
he had been smoking all the time was smoked out. He took time to fill
another before he went on. I said never a word, for I guessed who the
sleeping girl was.

"Well," Paul remarked presently, "that was a devilish queer dream,
wasn't it? You'll account for it by telling me I'd been so pestered with
the story of the banker's murder that I naturally had nightmare;
perhaps, too, that my digestion was out of order. Call it a nightmare,
call it dyspepsia, if you like. I _don't_, because---- But you'll see
why I don't directly.

"At the same moment that my dream-self awoke in my dream, my actual self
woke in reality, and with the same ghastly horror.

"I say the _same_ horror, for neither then nor afterward could I
separate my one self from my other self. They seemed identical; so that
this queer dream made a more lasting impression upon me than you'd
think. However, in the life I led that sort of thing couldn't last very
long. Before I came back from Africa I had utterly forgotten all about
it. Before I left Paris, though, and while it was quite fresh in my
memory, I sketched the big murderer just as I had seen him in my dream.
The great yellow face, the great broad frame in the fur travelling-robe,
the great hand with the great evil eye upon it--everything, carefully
and minutely, as though I had been going to paint a portrait that I
wanted to make lifelike. I think at the time I had some such intention.
If I had, I never fulfilled it. But I made the sketch, as I say,
carefully; and then I forgot all about it.

"Time passed--three years nearly. I was wintering in the south of France
that year. There it was that I met her--Lucille. Old D'Avray, her
father, and I had met before in Algeria. He was dying now. He left the
child on his death-bed to me.