Leggatt, my chauffeur, came in for orders.

‘How d’you think Harvey’s coming on?’ I said, as I rubbed the brute’s gulping neck.  The vet had warned me of the possibilities of spinal trouble following distemper.

‘He ain’t my fancy,’ was the reply.  ’But I don’t question his comings and goings so long as I ’aven’t to sit alone in a room with him.’

‘Why?  He’s as meek as Moses,’ I said.

‘He fair gives me the creeps.  P’r’aps he’ll go out in fits.’

But Harvey, as I wrote his mistress from time to time, throve, and when he grew better, would play by himself grisly games of spying, walking up, hailing, and chasing another dog.  From these he would break off of a sudden and return to his normal stiff gait, with the air of one who had forgotten some matter of life and death, which could be reached only by staring at me.  I left him one evening posturing with the unseen on the lawn, and went inside to finish some letters for the post.  I must have been at work nearly an hour, for I was going to turn on the lights, when I felt there was somebody in the room whom, the short hairs at the back of my neck warned me, I was not in the least anxious to face.  There was a mirror on the wall.  As I lifted my eyes to it I saw the dog Harvey reflected near the shadow by the closed door.  He had reared himself full-length on his hind legs, his head a little one side to clear a sofa between us, and he was looking at me.  The face, with its knitted brows and drawn lips, was the face of a dog, but the look, for the fraction of time that I caught it, was human—­wholly and horribly human.  When the blood in my body went forward again he had dropped to the floor, and was merely studying me in his usual one-eyed fashion.  Next day I returned him to Miss Sichliffe.  I would not have kept him another day for the wealth of Asia, or even Ella Godfrey’s approval.

Miss Sichliffe’s house I discovered to be a mid-Victorian mansion of peculiar villainy even for its period, surrounded by gardens of conflicting colours, all dazzling with glass and fresh paint on ironwork.  Striped blinds, for it was a blazing autumn morning, covered most of the windows, and a voice sang to the piano an almost forgotten song of Jean Ingelow’s—­

     Methought that the stars were blinking bright,
       And the old brig’s sails unfurled—­

Down came the loud pedal, and the unrestrained cry swelled out across a bed of tritomas consuming in their own fires—­

     When I said I will sail to my love this night
       On the other side of the world.

I have no music, but the voice drew.  I waited till the end: 

     Oh, maid most dear, I am not here
       I have no place apart—­
     No dwelling more on sea or shore,
       But only in thy heart.

It seemed to me a poor life that had no more than that to do at eleven o’clock of a Tuesday forenoon.  Then Miss Sichliffe suddenly lumbered through a French window in clumsy haste, her brows contracted against the light.