‘Zaleski?’ I whispered with bated breath.

Intently as I strained my ears, I could detect no reply.  The hairs of my head, catching terror from my fancies, erected themselves.

Again I advanced, and again I became aware of the sensation of contact.  With a quick movement I passed my hand upward and downward.

It was indeed he.  He was half-reclining, half-standing against a wall of the chamber:  that he was not dead, I at once knew by his uneasy breathing.  Indeed, when, having chafed his hands for some time, I tried to rouse him, he quickly recovered himself, and muttered:  ’I fainted; I want sleep—­only sleep.’  I bore him back to the lighted room, assisted by Ham in the latter part of the journey.  Ham’s ecstasies were infinite; he had hardly hoped to see his master’s face again.  His garments being wet and soiled, the negro divested him of them, and dressed him in a tightly-fitting scarlet robe of Babylonish pattern, reaching to the feet, but leaving the lower neck and forearm bare, and girt round the stomach by a broad gold-orphreyed ceinture.  With all the tenderness of a woman, the man stretched his master thus arrayed on the couch.  Here he kept an Argus guard while Zaleski, in one deep unbroken slumber of a night and a day, reposed before him.  When at last the sleeper woke, in his eye,—­full of divine instinct,—­flitted the wonted falchion-flash of the whetted, two-edged intellect; the secret, austere, self-conscious smile of triumph curved his lip; not a trace of pain or fatigue remained.  After a substantial meal on nuts, autumn fruits, and wine of Samos, he resumed his place on the couch; and I sat by his side to hear the story of his wandering.  He said: 

’We have, Shiel, had before us a very remarkable series of murders, and a very remarkable series of suicides.  Were they in any way connected?  To this extent, I think—­that the mysterious, the unparalleled nature of the murders gave rise to a morbid condition in the public mind, which in turn resulted in the epidemic of suicide.  But though such an epidemic has its origin in the instinct of imitation so common in men, you must not suppose that the mental process is a conscious one.  A person feels an impulse to go and do, and is not aware that at bottom it is only an impulse to go and do likewise.  He would indeed repudiate such an assumption.  Thus one man destroys himself, and another imitates him—­but whereas the former uses a pistol, the latter uses a rope.  It is rather absurd, therefore, to imagine that in any of those cases in which the slip of papyrus has been found in the mouth after death, the cause of death has been the slavish imitativeness of the suicidal mania,—­for this, as I say, is never slavish. The papyrus then—­quite apart from the unmistakable evidences of suicide invariably left by each self-destroyer—­affords us definite and certain means by which we can distinguish the two classes of deaths; and we are thus able to divide the total number into two nearly equal halves.