I found myself looking out upon a scene that was altogether strange to me.  The night was overcast, and through the flocculent grey of the heaped clouds there filtered a faint half-light of dawn.  Just at the edge of the sky the cloud-canopy had a blood-red rim.  Below, everything was dark and indistinct, dim hills in the distance, a vague mass of buildings running up into pinnacles, trees like spilt ink, and below the window a tracery of black bushes and pale grey paths.  It was so unfamiliar that for the moment I thought myself still dreaming.  I felt the toilet-table; it appeared to be made of some polished wood, and was rather elaborately furnished—­there were little cut-glass bottles and a brush upon it.  There was also a queer little object, horse-shoe shape it felt, with smooth, hard projections, lying in a saucer.  I could find no matches nor candlestick.

I turned my eyes to the room again.  Now the blind was up, faint spectres of its furnishing came out of the darkness.  There was a huge curtained bed, and the fireplace at its foot had a large white mantel with something of the shimmer of marble.

I leant against the toilet-table, shut my eyes and opened them again, and tried to think.  The whole thing was far too real for dreaming.  I was inclined to imagine there was still some hiatus in my memory, as a consequence of my draught of that strange liqueur; that I had come into my inheritance perhaps, and suddenly lost my recollection of everything since my good fortune had been announced.  Perhaps if I waited a little, things would be clearer to me again.  Yet my dinner with old Elvesham was now singularly vivid and recent.  The champagne, the observant waiters, the powder, and the liqueurs—­I could have staked my soul it all happened a few hours ago.

And then occurred a thing so trivial and yet so terrible to me that I shiver now to think of that moment.  I spoke aloud.  I said, “How the devil did I get here?” ... And the voice was not my own.

It was not my own, it was thin, the articulation was slurred, the resonance of my facial bones was different.  Then, to reassure myself I ran one hand over the other, and felt loose folds of skin, the bony laxity of age.  “Surely,” I said, in that horrible voice that had somehow established itself in my throat, “surely this thing is a dream!” Almost as quickly as if I did it involuntarily, I thrust my fingers into my mouth.  My teeth had gone.  My finger-tips ran on the flaccid surface of an even row of shrivelled gums.  I was sick with dismay and disgust.

I felt then a passionate desire to see myself, to realise at once in its full horror the ghastly change that had come upon me.  I tottered to the mantel, and felt along it for matches.  As I did so, a barking cough sprang up in my throat, and I clutched the thick flannel nightdress I found about me.  There were no matches there, and I suddenly realised that my extremities were cold.  Sniffing and coughing,