pushed at the door, and in the
act, made a back leap into the corridor.

Scarcely, in doing so, did I look for the totter and collapse outwards of
the rigid form. I had expected to see it fall away, face down, into the
cell, as its support swung from it. Yet it was, I swear, as if something
from within had relaxed its grasp and given the fearful dead man a
swingeing push outwards as the door opened.

It went on its back, with a dusty slap on the stone flags, and from all
its spectators--me included--came a sudden drawn sound, like wind in a
keyhole.

What can I say, or how describe it? A dead thing it was--but the face!

Barred with livid scars where the grating rails had crossed it, the rest
seemed to have been worked and kneaded into a mere featureless plate of
yellow and expressionless flesh.

And it was this I had seen in the glass!

* * * * *

There was an interval following the experience above narrated, during
which a certain personality that had once been mine was effaced or
suspended, and I seemed a passive creature, innocent of the least desire
of independence. It was not that I was actually ill or actually insane. A
merciful Providence set my finer wits slumbering, that was all, leaving
me a sufficiency of the grosser faculties that were necessary to the
right ordering of my behaviour.

I kept to my room, it is true, and even lay a good deal in bed; but this
was more to satisfy the busy scruples of a _locum tenens_--a practitioner
of the neighbourhood, who came daily to the prison to officiate in my
absence--than to cosset a complaint that in its inactivity was purely
negative. I could review what had happened with a calmness as profound
as if I had read of it in a book. I could have wished to continue my
duties, indeed, had the power of insistence remained to me. But the saner
medicus was acute where I had gone blunt, and bade me to the restful
course. He was right. I was mentally stunned, and had I not slept off my
lethargy, I should have gone mad in an hour--leapt at a bound, probably,
from inertia to flaming lunacy.

I remembered everything, but through a fluffy atmosphere, so to speak. It
was as if I looked on bygone pictures through ground glass that softened
the ugly outlines.

Sometimes I referred to these to my substitute, who was wise to answer me
according to my mood; for the truth left me unruffled, whereas an obvious
evasion of it would have distressed m