doctor stretched his arm out and took the white cloth from the bowl.

It was perhaps imagination that persuaded me the red glare of the lamps
grew fainter and the air over the table before us thickened. I had been
expecting something for so long that the movement of my companions, and
the lifting of the cloth, may easily have caused the momentary delusion
that something hovered in the air before my face, touching the skin of
my cheeks with a silken run. But it was certainly not a delusion that
the Colonel looked up at the same moment and glanced over his shoulder,
as though his eyes followed the movements of something to and fro about
the room, and that he then buttoned his overcoat more tightly about him
and his eyes sought my own face first, and then the doctor's. And it was
no delusion that his face seemed somehow to have turned dark, become
spread as it were with a shadowy blackness. I saw his lips tighten and
his expression grow hard and stern, and it came to me then with a rush
that, of course, this man had told us but a part of the experiences he
had been through in the house, and that there was much more he had never
been able to bring himself to reveal at all. I felt sure of it. The way
he turned and stared about him betrayed a familiarity with other things
than those he had described to us. It was not merely a sight of fire he
looked for; it was a sight of something alive, intelligent, something
able to evade his searching; it was _a person_. It was the watch for the
ancient Being who sought to obsess him.

And the way in which Dr. Silence answered his look--though it was only
by a glance of subtlest sympathy--confirmed my impression.

"We may be ready now," I heard him say in a whisper, and I understood
that his words were intended as a steadying warning, and braced myself
mentally to the utmost of my power.

Yet long before Colonel Wragge had turned to stare about the room, and
long before the doctor had confirmed my impression that things were at
last beginning to stir, I had become aware in most singular fashion that
the place held more than our three selves. With the rising of the wind
this increase to our numbers had first taken place. The baying of the
hounds almost seemed to have signalled it. I cannot say how it may be
possible to realise that an empty place has suddenly become--not empty,
when the new arrival is nothing that appeals to any one of the senses;
for this recognition of an "invisible,"