rtrait of
a lady, with black, resolute brows and full, voluptuous mouth and chin.
She has a high colour, an exquisite hand and arm, and an Amazonian
bearing.

"Passing from the gallery, you enter a long passage, leading to other
passages and staircases, with which we have nothing to do.

"I only want you now to become acquainted with my own rooms. As you
enter the passage from the gallery, two doors open, one on either hand.
To the right is my sitting-room, a square, cheerful room, looking on the
street; to the left is my bedroom, which will require a more particular
description.

"It is a large, low room. As you enter from the passage, the window,
which looks into the garden, is opposite to you. In the middle of the
wall to your right hand stands the bed, and opposite to that, the
fireplace, and, as you will see, if you have taken in my description,
just at the back of the portrait of the lady with the black eyebrows, is
another door. Opposite to this last is yet another, which caught my
attention when I first entered the room from a peculiarity about it. The
upper part of this door is of glass, rendered opaque by being washed or
lined with some red substance.

"As soon as I was alone in the room I tried to open this door, but it
was firmly fastened. I don't know why I should have felt disquieted by
this circumstance, but certainly I did feel annoyed. I thought at first
that it probably opened into a dressing-room. There must have been a
strong light behind it, for a red light always fell on that side of the
room through the coloured glass, and I could see that red light in the
morning, before any light penetrated the window-blind.

"I think I have now told you all that is necessary for understanding my
experience.

"I must ask you to remember that yesterday was the thirteenth of April.
I went to bed about eleven o'clock, and soon fell asleep. I could not,
however, have slept long before I woke with an unusual feeling that
something strange was going to happen.

"I awoke, not as one does in the morning, with a drowsy resolve not to
go to sleep again because it is time to get up, but as one awakes when a
journey or some similar event is imminent, for which one's faculties
have to be clear, and one's body active and alert. I was rather
wondering at and enjoying the unusual clearness and energy of thought of
which I felt capable, when the clock in the hall began striking, and,
almost at the same moment, the clock