on the window.  With thought and expectation resolutely suspended, Lefevre swung out of the room and to the hall-door.  He opened it, and stood and gazed.  The light of the hall-lamp fell upon a figure, the sight of which sent the blood in a gush to his heart, and pierced him with horror.  He expected Julius, and he looked on the man whom he had followed on the crowded pavements some weeks before,—­the man whom the police had long sought for ineffectually!

“Won’t you let me in, Lefevre?” said the man.

The doctor stood speechless, with his eyes fixed:  the face and dress of the person before him were those of Hernando Courtney, but the voice was the voice of Julius, though it sounded strange and distant, and bore an accent as of death.  Lefevre was involved in a wild turmoil and horror of surmise, too appalling to be exactly stated to himself; for he shrank with all his energy from the conclusion to which he was being forced.  He turned, however, upon the request for admission, and led the way into the dining-room, letting his visitor close the door and follow.

“Lefevre,” said the strange voice, “I have come to show myself to you, because I know you are a true-hearted friend, and because I think you have that exquisite charity that can forgive all things.”

“Show myself!” ...  As Lefevre listened to the strange voice and looked at the strange person, the suspicion came upon him—­What if he were but regarding an Illusion?  He had read in some of his mystical and magical writers, that men gifted with certain powers could project to a distance eidola or phantasms of varying likeness to themselves:  might not this be such a mocking phantasm of Julius?  He drew his hand across his eyes, and looked again:  the figure still sat there.  He put out his hand to test its substantiality, and the voice cried in a keen pitch of terror—­

“Don’t touch me!—­for your own sake!...  Why, Lefevre, do you look so amazed and overcome?  Is not my wretched secret written in my face?”

“And you are really Julius Courtney?” asked Lefevre, at length finding utterance, with measured emphasis, and in a voice which he hardly recognised as his own.

“I am Julius Courtney—­”

He paused, for Lefevre had put his head in his hands, shaken with a silent paroxysm of grief.  It wrung the doctor’s heart, as if in the person that sat opposite him, all that was noblest and most gracious in humanity were disgraced and overthrown.

“Yes,” continued the voice, “I am Julius; there is no other Courtney that I know of, and soon there will be none at all.”  The doctor listened, but he could not endure to look again.  “I am dying—­I have been dying for a dozen years, and for a dozen years I have resisted and overcome death; now I surrender.  I have come to my period.  I shall never enter your house again.  I have only come now to confess myself, and to ask a last favour of you—­a last token of friendship.”