It came into my mind that some one had entered the room to rob me of my rouleau of money, but after lying for some moments, breathing regularly to simulate sleep, I realised this was mere fancy.  Nevertheless, the uneasy assurance of something wrong kept fast hold of me.  With an effort I raised my head from the pillow, and peered about me at the dark.  What it was I could not conceive.  I looked at the dim shapes around me, the greater and lesser darknesses that indicated curtains, table, fireplace, bookshelves, and so forth.  Then I began to perceive something unfamiliar in the forms of the darkness.  Had the bed turned round?  Yonder should be the bookshelves, and something shrouded and pallid rose there, something that would not answer to the bookshelves, however I looked at it.  It was far too big to be my shirt thrown on a chair.

Overcoming a childish terror, I threw back the bedclothes and thrust my leg out of bed.  Instead of coming out of my truckle-bed upon the floor, I found my foot scarcely reached the edge of the mattress.  I made another step, as it were, and sat up on the edge of the bed.  By the side of my bed should be the candle, and the matches upon the broken chair.  I put out my hand and touched—­nothing.  I waved my hand in the darkness, and it came against some heavy hanging, soft and thick in texture, which gave a rustling noise at my touch.  I grasped this and pulled it; it appeared to be a curtain suspended over the head of my bed.

I was now thoroughly awake, and beginning to realise that I was in a strange room.  I was puzzled.  I tried to recall the overnight circumstances, and I found them now, curiously enough, vivid in my memory:  the supper, my reception of the little packages, my wonder whether I was intoxicated, my slow undressing, the coolness to my flushed face of my pillow.  I felt a sudden distrust.  Was that last night, or the night before?  At any rate, this room was strange to me, and I could not imagine how I had got into it.  The dim, pallid outline was growing paler, and I perceived it was a window, with the dark shape of an oval toilet-glass against the weak intimation of the dawn that filtered through the blind.  I stood up, and was surprised by a curious feeling of weakness and unsteadiness.  With trembling hands outstretched, I walked slowly towards the window, getting, nevertheless, a bruise on the knee from a chair by the way.  I fumbled round the glass, which was large, with handsome brass sconces, to find the blind cord.  I could not find any.  By chance I took hold of the tassel, and with the click of a spring the blind ran up.