never look up until the last column had been added. And yet it was
fine self-restraint, for all the time I knew that wonderful things were
happening in the mirror. Every nerve in my body told me so. If I looked
up there was an end of my work. So I did not look up till all was
finished. Then, when at last with throbbing temples I threw down my pen
and raised my eyes, what a sight was there!

The mirror in its silver frame was like a stage, brilliantly lit, in
which a drama was in progress. There was no mist now. The oppression of
my nerves had wrought this amazing clarity. Every feature, every
movement, was as clear-cut as in life. To think that I, a tired
accountant, the most prosaic of mankind, with the account-books of a
swindling bankrupt before me, should be chosen of all the human race to
look upon such a scene!

It was the same scene and the same figures, but the drama had advanced a
stage. The tall young man was holding the woman in his arms. She
strained away from him and looked up at him with loathing in her face.
They had torn the crouching man away from his hold upon the skirt of her
dress. A dozen of them were round him--savage men, bearded men. They
hacked at him with knives. All seemed to strike him together. Their arms
rose and fell. The blood did not flow from him--it squirted. His red
dress was dabbled in it. He threw himself this way and that, purple upon
crimson, like an over-ripe plum. Still they hacked, and still the jets
shot from him. It was horrible--horrible! They dragged him kicking to
the door. The woman looked over her shoulder at him and her mouth gaped.
I heard nothing, but I knew that she was screaming. And then, whether it
was this nerve-racking vision before me, or whether, my task finished,
all the overwork of the past weeks came in one crushing weight upon me,
the room danced round me, the floor seemed to sink away beneath my feet,
and I remembered no more. In the early morning my landlady found me
stretched senseless before the silver mirror, but I knew nothing myself
until three days ago I awoke in the deep peace of the doctor's nursing
home.

_Feb. 9._--Only to-day have I told Dr. Sinclair my full experience. He
had not allowed me to speak of such matters before. He listened with an
absorbed interest. "You don't identify this with any well-known scene in
history?" he asked, with suspicion in his eyes. I assured him that I
knew nothing of history. "Have you no idea whence that mir