by
gaslight in the dull sitting-room of my lodgings in the Lambeth Road,
when he staggered in upon me. His face was like a sheep's, white and
vacant; his hands had caught a trick of groping blindly along the backs
of chairs.

"You have obtained your 'copy'?" I said.

I made him out to murmur "yes" in a shaking under-voice. He was so
patently nervous that I put him in a chair and poured him out a
wine-glassful of London brandy. This generally is a powerful emetic, but
it had no more effect upon him than water. Then I was about to lower the
gas, to save his eyes, but he stopped me with a thin shriek.

"Light, light!" he whispered. "It cannot be too light for me!"

"Now, William Tyrwhitt," I said, by-and-by, watchful of him, and marking
a faint effusion of colour soak to his cheek, "you would not accept my
warning, and you were extremely rude to me. Therefore you have had an
experience--"

"An awful one," he murmured.

"An awful one, no doubt; and to obtain surcease of the haunting memory of
it, you must confide its processes to me. But, first, I must put it to
you, which is the more pusillanimous--to refuse to submit one's manliness
to the tyranny of the unlawful, or to rush into situations you have not
the nerve to adapt yourself to?"

"I could not foresee, I could not foresee."

"Neither could I. And that was my very reason for declining the
invitation. Now proceed."

It was long before he could. But presently he essayed, and gathered voice
with the advance of his narrative, and even unconsciously threw it into
something the form of "copy." And here it is as he murmured it, but with
a gasp for every full-stop.

"I confess I was so far moved by the tone of your protest as, after your
departure, to make some cautious inquiries about the house we had
visited. I could discover nothing to satisfy my curiosity. It was known
to have been untenanted for a great number of years; but as to who was
the landlord, whether Captain Iron or another, no one could inform me;
and the agent for the property was of the adjacent town where you met me.
I was not fortunate, indeed, in finding that any one even knew of the
oddly appointed room; but considering that, owing to the time the house
had remained vacant, the existence of this eccentricity could be a
tradition only with some casual few, my failure did not strike me as
being at all bodeful. On the contrary, it only whetted my desire to
investigate further in person, and pen