which is characteristic of midnight London; sometimes, too, the
clashing of buffers upon some siding of the Brighton railway where
shunting was in progress and occasional siren notes from the Thames.
Otherwise--nothing.

He glanced at the luminous disk of his watch. The hour was half-past
two. Dawn was not far off. The night seemed to have become almost
intolerably hot, and to this heat Stuart felt disposed to ascribe
both his awakening and also a feeling of uncomfortable tension of
which he now became aware. He continued to listen, and, listening
and hearing nothing, recognized with anger that he was frightened.
A sense of some presence oppressed him. Someone or something evil
was near him--perhaps in the room, veiled by the shadows. This
uncanny sensation grew more and more marked.

Stuart sat up in bed, slowly and cautiously, looking all about him.
He remembered to have awakened once thus in India--and to have found
a great cobra coiled at his feet. His inspection revealed the
presence of nothing unfamiliar, and he stepped out on to the floor.

A faint clicking sound reached his ears. He stood quite still. The
clicking was repeated.

"There is someone downstairs in my study!" muttered Stuart.

He became aware that the fear which held him was such that unless he
acted and acted swiftly he should become incapable of action, but he
remembered that whereas the moonlight poured into the bedroom, the
staircase would be in complete darkness. He walked barefooted across
to the dressing-table and took up an electric torch which lay there.
He had not used it for some time, and he pressed the button to learn
if the torch was charged. A beam of white light shone out across the
room, and at the same instant came another sound.

If it came from below or above, from the adjoining room or from

Outside in the road, Stuart knew not. But following hard upon the
mysterious disturbance which had aroused him it seemed to pour ice
into his veins, it added the complementary touch to his panic. For
it was a kind of low wail--a ghostly minor wail in falling
cadences--unlike any sound he had heard. It was so excessively
horrible that it produced a curious effect.

Discovering from the dancing of the torch-ray that his hand was
trembling, Stuart concluded that he had awakened from a nightmare
and that this fiendish wailing was no more than an unusually delayed
aftermath of the imaginary horrors which had bathed him in cold
perspirat