The stranger heaved a sigh as of fond reminiscence, and looked round for the sympathy which in our company of bachelors he failed of; even the sympathetic Rulledge failed of the necessary experience to move him in compassionate response.

“Well,” the stranger went on, a little damped perhaps by his failure, but supported apparently by the interest of the fact in hand, “I had the smoking-room to myself for a while, and then a fellow put his head in that I thought I knew after I had thought I didn’t know him.  He dawned on me more and more, and I had to acknowledge to myself, by and by, that it was a man named Melford, whom I used to room with in Holworthy at Harvard; that is, we had an apartment of two bedrooms and a study; and I suppose there were never two fellows knew less of each other than we did at the end of our four years together.  I can’t say what Melford knew of me, but the most I knew of Melford was his particular brand of nightmare.”

Wanhope gave the first sign of his interest in the matter.  He took his cigar from his lips, and softly emitted an “Ah!”

Rulledge went further and interrogatively repeated the word “Nightmare?”

“Nightmare,” the stranger continued, firmly.  “The curious thing about it was that I never exactly knew the subject of his nightmare, and a more curious thing yet was Melford himself never knew it, when I woke him up.  He said he couldn’t make out anything but a kind of scraping in a door-lock.  His theory was that in his childhood it had been a much completer thing, but that the circumstances had broken down in a sort of decadence, and now there was nothing left of it but that scraping in the door-lock, like somebody trying to turn a misfit key.  I used to throw things at his door, and once I tried a cold-water douche from the pitcher, when he was very hard to waken; but that was rather brutal, and after a while I used to let him roar himself awake; he would always do it, if I trusted to nature; and before our junior year was out I got so that I could sleep through, pretty calmly; I would just say to myself when he fetched me to the surface with a yell, ’That’s Melford dreaming,’ and doze off sweetly.”

“Jove!” Rulledge said, “I don’t see how you could stand it.”

“There’s everything in habit, Rulledge,” Minver put in.  “Perhaps our friend only dreamt that he heard a dream.”

“That’s quite possible,” the stranger owned, politely.  “But the case is superficially as I state it.  However, it was all past, long ago, when I recognized Melford in the smoking-room that night:  it must have been ten or a dozen years.  I was wearing a full beard then, and so was he; we wore as much beard as we could in those days.  I had been through the war since college, and he had been in California, most of the time, and, as he told me, he had been up north, in Alaska, just after we bought it, and hurt his eyes—­had snow-blindness—­and he wore spectacles.