rom a perfect stranger.

"I am much obliged," I snapped, "but I prefer tea."

At that moment I put my hand in my pocket for my cigarette case. I
thought I would give this man one to stop his tiresome talking; as I
pulled it out the key of the safe which the old lady had given me fell
out with it. Before I could stoop and pick it up myself the man with
the glass eye had got it. He put it up close to his good eye and
examined it critically. "What an extraordinary key!" he observed.
"Where did you get it?"

Then he saw the letter C which was worked among the elaborate tracery
of the handle, and he became greatly agitated.

"Where did you get this from?" he repeated abruptly.

I did not answer; I got up from my seat and took the key out of his
hand; he was by no means willing to part with it.

"Excuse me," I said.

Then with the key safe in my pocket and my hand over it, I walked out
of the smoking-room, leaving behind me two pieces of buttered toast and
perhaps a cup and a half of excellent tea all wasted.

I am a delicately constituted individual, and I preferred smoking my
cigarette all alone in a corner of the big hall, to consuming my usual
allowance of tea and buttered toast in the society of the glass-eyed
person in the smoking-room. I considered that I was doing a little
intellectual fast all by myself.

I saw nothing more of my friend of the false brown optic that evening,
except that I observed his bloodshot eye of the flesh fixed scathingly
upon me from a remote corner of the great dining-room, where he
appeared to be dining mostly off a large bottle of champagne.

I sauntered away my evening as I had done the others of my first week's
"cure" in Bath, making a fair division of it between the dining-room,
the smoking-room and the reading-room. I did not go near the
drawing-room; its occupants consisted solely of a few obese ladies of
the type referred to by the gentleman with the glass eye, wearing such
palpable wigs that my artistic susceptibilities were sorely wounded at
the mere sight of them, and my sense of decency outraged.

I went to bed in my great room over-looking the river and the weir, and
I lay awake listening to its rushing waters, for the night was warm and
almost summer-like, as it happens sometimes in a fine November, and my
windows were open.

I suppose I fell asleep, for when I was again conscious, the Abbey
clock struck four; at the same moment I became aware that some one w