argue about it even
as I looked at it, and to tell myself that it was a subjective
impression--a chimera of the nerves--begotten by worry and insomnia. But
why this particular shape? And who is the woman, and what is the
dreadful emotion which I read in those wonderful brown eyes? They come
between me and my work. For the first time I have done less than the
daily tally which I had marked out. Perhaps that is why I have had no
abnormal sensations to-night. To-morrow I must wake up, come what may.

_Jan. 11._--All well, and good progress with my work. I wind the net,
coil after coil, round that bulky body. But the last smile may remain
with him if my own nerves break over it. The mirror would seem to be a
sort of barometer which marks my brain pressure. Each night I have
observed that it had clouded before I reached the end of my task.

Dr. Sinclair (who is, it seems, a bit of a psychologist) was so
interested in my account that he came round this evening to have a look
at the mirror. I had observed that something was scribbled in crabbed
old characters upon the metal work at the back. He examined this with a
lens, but could make nothing of it. "Sanc. X. Pal." was his final
reading of it, but that did not bring us any further. He advised me to
put it away into another room, but, after all, whatever I may see in it
is, by his own account, only a symptom. It is in the cause that the
danger lies. The twenty ledgers--not the silver mirror--should be packed
away if I could only do it. I'm at the eighth now, so I progress.

_Jan. 13._--Perhaps it would have been wiser after all if I had packed
away the mirror. I had an extraordinary experience with it last night.
And yet I find it so interesting, so fascinating, that even now I will
keep it in its place. What on earth is the meaning of it all?

I suppose it was about one in the morning, and I was closing my books
preparatory to staggering off to bed, when I saw her there in front of
me. The stage of mistiness and development must have passed unobserved,
and there she was in all her beauty and passion and distress, as
clear-cut as if she were really in the flesh before me. The figure was
small, but very distinct--so much so that every feature, and every
detail of dress, are stamped in my memory. She is seated on the extreme
left of the mirror. A sort of shadowy figure crouches down beside her--I
can dimly discern that it is a man--and then behind them is cloud, in
which I s