Lucian stood still in the road while the woman’s cries grew faint and died away.  His heart was chilled within him as the significance of this strange incident became clear.  He remembered nothing of his violent gestures; he had not known at the time that he had sworn out loud, or that he was grinding his teeth with impotent rage.  He only thought of that ringing scream, of the horrible fear on the white face that had looked upon him, of the woman’s headlong flight from his presence.  He stood trembling and shuddering, and in a little while he was feeling his face, searching for some loathsome mark, for the stigmata of evil branding his forehead.  He staggered homewards like a drunken man, and when he came into the Uxbridge Road some children saw him and called after him as he swayed and caught at the lamp-post.  When he got to his room he sat down at first in the dark.  He did not dare to light the gas.  Everything in the room was indistinct, but he shut his eyes as he passed the dressing-table, and sat in a corner, his face turned to the wall.  And when at last he gathered courage and the flame leapt hissing from the jet, he crept piteously towards the glass, and ducked his head, crouching miserably, and struggling with his terrors before he could look at his own image.

To the best of his power he tried to deliver himself from these more grotesque fantasies; he assured himself that there was nothing terrific in his countenance but sadness, that his face was like the face of other men.  Yet he could not forget that reflection he had seen in the woman’s eyes, how the surest mirrors had shown him a horrible dread, her soul itself quailing and shuddering at an awful sight.  Her scream rang and rang in his ears; she had fled away from him as if he offered some fate darker than death.

He looked again and again into the glass, tortured by a hideous uncertainty.  His senses told him there was nothing amiss, yet he had had a proof, and yet, as he peered most earnestly, there was, it seemed, something strange and not altogether usual in the expression of the eyes.  Perhaps it might be the unsteady flare of the gas, or perhaps a flaw in the cheap looking-glass, that gave some slight distortion to the image.  He walked briskly up and down the room and tried to gaze steadily, indifferently, into his own face.  He would not allow himself to be misguided by a word.  When he had pronounced himself incapable of humanity, he had only meant that he could not enjoy the simple things of common life.  A man was not necessarily monstrous, merely because he did not appreciate high tea, a quiet chat about the neighbors, and a happy noisy evening with the children.  But with what message, then, did he appear charged that the woman’s mouth grew so stark?  Her hands had jerked up as if they had been pulled with frantic wires; she seemed for the instant like a horrible puppet.  Her scream was a thing from the nocturnal Sabbath.