Into the details of the infamy at which I thus connived (for even now
I can scarce grant that I committed it) I have no design of entering; I
mean but to point out the warnings and the successive steps with which
my chastisement approached. I met with one accident which, as it brought
on no consequence, I shall no more than mention. An act of cruelty to a
child aroused against me the anger of a passer-by, whom I recognised
the other day in the person of your kinsman; the doctor and the child's
family joined him; there were moments when I feared for my life; and at
last, in order to pacify their too just resentment, Edward Hyde had to
bring them to the door, and pay them in a cheque drawn in the name of
Henry Jekyll. But this danger was easily eliminated from the future, by
opening an account at another bank in the name of Edward Hyde himself;
and when, by sloping my own hand backward, I had supplied my double with
a signature, I thought I sat beyond the reach of fate.

Some two months before the murder of Sir Danvers, I had been out for one
of my adventures, had returned at a late hour, and woke the next day in
bed with somewhat odd sensations. It was in vain I looked about me; in
vain I saw the decent furniture and tall proportions of my room in the
square; in vain that I recognised the pattern of the bed curtains and
the design of the mahogany frame; something still kept insisting that I
was not where I was, that I had not wakened where I seemed to be, but in
the little room in Soho where I was accustomed to sleep in the body
of Edward Hyde. I smiled to myself, and in my psychological way, began
lazily to inquire into the elements of this illusion, occasionally, even
as I did so, dropping back into a comfortable morning doze. I was still
so engaged when, in one of my more wakeful moments, my eyes fell upon
my hand. Now the hand of Henry Jekyll (as you have often remarked) was
professional in shape and size: it was large, firm, white and comely.
But the hand which I now saw, clearly enough, in the yellow light of a
mid-London morning, lying half shut on the bedclothes, was lean, corder,
knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of
hair. It was the hand of Edward Hyde.

I must have stared upon it for near half a minute, sunk as I was in the
mere stupidity of wonder, before terror woke up in my breast as sudden
and startling as the crash of cymbals; and bounding from my bed I rushed
to the mirror