Having disburdened his mind of this horrible secret, Marston felt for a time a sense of relief amounting almost to elation.  With far less of apprehension and dismay than he had done so for months before, he that night repaired to his bedroom.  There was nothing in his case, Doctor Parkes believed, to warrant his keeping any watch upon Marston’s actions, and accordingly he bid him good-night, in the full confidence of meeting him, if not better, at least not worse, on the ensuing morning.

He miscalculated, however.  Marston had probably himself been conscious of some coming crisis in his hideous malady, when he took the decisive step of placing himself under the care of Doctor Parkes.  Certain it is, that upon that very night the disease broke forth in a new and appalling development.  Doctor Parkes, whose bedroom was next to that occupied by Marston, was awakened in the dead of night by a howling, more like that of a beast than a human voice, and which gradually swelled into an absolute yell; then came some horrid laughter and entreaties, thick and frantic; then again the same unearthly howl.  The practiced ear of Doctor Parkes recognized but too surely the terrific import of those sounds.  Springing from his bed, and seizing the candle which always burned in his chamber, in anticipation of such sudden and fearful emergencies, he hurried with a palpitating heart, and spite of his long habituation to such scenes as he expected, with a certain sense of horror, to the chamber of his aristocratic patient.

Late as it was, Marston had not yet gone to bed; his candle was still burning, and he himself, half dressed, stood in the center of the floor, shaking and livid, his eyes burning with the preterhuman fires of insanity.  As Doctor Parkes entered the chamber, another shout, or rather yell, thundered from the lips of this demoniac effigy; and the mad-doctor stood freezing with horror in the doorway, and yet exerting what remained to him of presence of mind, in the vain endeavor, in the flaring light of the candle, to catch and fix with his own practiced eye the gaze of the maniac.  Second after second, and minute after minute, he stood confronting this frightful slave of Satan, in the momentary expectation that he would close with and destroy him.  On a sudden, however, this brief agony of suspense was terminated; a change like an awakening consciousness of realities, or rather like the withdrawal of some hideous and visible influence from within, passed over the tense and darkened features of the wretched being; a look of horrified perplexity, doubt, and inquiry, supervened, and he at last said, in a subdued and sullen tone, to Doctor Parkes: 

“Who are you, sir?  What do you want here?  Who are you, sir, I say?”

“Who am I?  Why, your physician, sir; Doctor Parkes, sir; the owner of this house, sir,” replied he, with all the sternness he could command, and yet white as a specter with agitation.  “For shame, sir, for shame, to give way thus.  What do you mean by creating this causeless alarm, and disturbing the whole household at so unseasonable an hour?  For shame, sir; go to your bed; undress yourself this moment; for shame.”