face toward the speaker.

"This is the subject," said Pierre Villiers. "It gives me scope to
amuse and tell the truth at the same time. A man pierces a hole in the
wall of a boarding-house room, and watches what is going on in the next
room."

. . . . .

I must have looked at the speakers just then with a rather sorry
expression of bewilderment. Then I quickly lowered my head like a
child afraid to be seen.

They had spoken for /me,/ and I sensed a strange secret service
intrigue around me. Then, in an instant this impression, which had got
the better of my common sense, gave way. Evidently a pure coincidence.
Still I was left with the vague apprehension that they were going to
notice that I /knew,/ and were going to recognise me.

One of the novelist's friends begged him to tell more of his story. He
consented.

He was going to tell it in my presence!

. . . . .

With admirable art in the use of words, gestures, and mimicry, and with
a lively elegance and a contagious laugh, he described a series of
brilliant, surprising scenes. Under cover of his scheme, which brought
all the scenes out into peculiar relief and gave them a special
intensity, he retailed a lot of amusing oddities, described comical
persons and things, heaped up picturesque and piquant details, coined
typical and witty proper names, and invented complicated and ingenious
situations. He succeeded in producing irresistible effects, and the
whole was in the latest style.

They said, "Ah!" and "Oh!" and opened their eyes wide.

"Bravo! A sure success! A corking funny idea!"

"All the characters who pass before the eyes of the man spying upon
them are amusing, even the man who kills himself. Nothing forgotten.
The whole of humanity is there."

But I had not recognized a single thing in the entire show.

A stupor and a sort of shame overwhelmed me as I heard that man trying
to extract the utmost entertainment possible from the dark happenings
that had been torturing me for a month.

I thought of that great voice, now silenced, which had said so clearly
and forcefully that the writers of to-day imitate the caricaturists.
I, who had penetrated into the heart of humanity and returned again,
found nothing human in this jiggling caricature! It was so superficial
that it was a lie.

He said in front of me--of me the awful witness:

"It is man stripped of all outward appearances that I want people to
see. Others are fiction, I am t