r the
con--. Go quietly downstairs. Say I am unwell; don't wait dinner for me;
come back in an hour; oh, half an hour!'

The answer broke out angrily. 'You must be mad, beside yourself, to ask
such a thing. I shall wait in the next room until you call.'

'Wait where you please,' Lawford replied, 'but tell them downstairs.'

'Then if I tell them to wait until half-past eight, you will come down?
You say you are not ill: the dinner will be ruined. It's absurd.'

Lawford made no answer. He listened a while, then he deliberately sat
down once more to try to think. Like a squirrel in a cage his mind
seemed to be aimlessly, unceasingly astir. 'What is it really? What
is it really?--really?' He sat there and it seemed to him his body was
transparent as glass. It seemed he had no body at all--only the memory
of an hallucinatory reflection in the glass, and this inward voice
crying, arguing, questioning, threatening out of the silence--'What is
it really--really--REALLY?' And at last, cold, wearied out, he rose
once more and leaned between the two long candle-flames, and stared
on--on--on, into the glass.

He gave that long, dark face that had been foisted on him tricks to
do--lift an eyebrow, frown. There was scarcely any perceptible pause
between the wish and its performance. He found to his discomfiture that
the face answered instantaneously to the slightest emotion, even to his
fainter secondary thoughts; as if these unfamiliar features were not
entirely within control. He could not, in fact, without the glass before
him, tell precisely what that face WAS expressing. He was still, it
seemed, keenly sane. That he would discover for certain when Sheila
returned. Terror, rage, horror had fallen back. If only he felt ill, or
was in pain: he would have rejoiced at it. He was simply caught in some
unheard-of snare--caught, how? when? where? by whom?

CHAPTER TWO

But the coolness and deliberation of his scrutiny, had to a certain
extent calmed Lawford's mind and given him confidence. Hitherto he had
met the little difficulties of life only to vanquish them with ease and
applause. Now he was standing face to face with the unknown. He burst
out laughing, into a long, low, helpless laughter. Then he arose and
began to walk softly, swiftly, to and fro across the room--from wall to
wall seven paces, and at the fourth, that awful, unseen, brightly-lit
profile passed as swiftly over the tranquil surface of the
looking-glass.