Words cannot tell what a sense I had, at the same time, of the dreadful mystery that he was to me.  When he fell asleep of an evening, with his knotted hands clenching the sides of the easy-chair, and his bald head tattooed with deep wrinkles falling forward on his breast, I would sit and look at him, wondering what he had done, and loading him with all the crimes in the Calendar, until the impulse was powerful on me to start up and fly from him.  Every hour so increased my abhorrence of him, that I even think I might have yielded to this impulse in the first agonies of being so haunted, notwithstanding all he had done for me, and the risk he ran, but for the knowledge that Herbert must soon come back.  Once, I actually did start out of bed in the night, and begin to dress myself in my worst clothes, hurriedly intending to leave him there with everything else I possessed, and enlist for India as a private soldier.

I doubt if a ghost could have been more terrible to me, up in those lonely rooms in the long evenings and long nights, with the wind and the rain always rushing by.  A ghost could not have been taken and hanged on my account, and the consideration that he could be, and the dread that he would be, were no small addition to my horrors.  When he was not asleep, or playing a complicated kind of patience with a ragged pack of cards of his own — a game that I never saw before or since, and in which he recorded his winnings by sticking his jack-knife into the table — when he was not engaged in either of these pursuits, he would ask me to read to him — “Foreign language, dear boy!” While I complied, he, not comprehending a single word, would stand before the fire surveying me with the air of an Exhibitor, and I would see him, between the fingers of the hand with which I shaded my face, appealing in dumb show to the furniture to take notice of my proficiency.  The imaginary student pursued by the misshapen creature he had impiously made, was not more wretched than I, pursued by the creature who had made me, and recoiling from him with a stronger repulsion, the more he admired me and the fonder he was of me.

This is written of, I am sensible, as if it had lasted a year.  It lasted about five days.  Expecting Herbert all the time, I dared not go out, except when I took Provis for an airing after dark.  At length, one evening when dinner was over and I had dropped into a slumber quite worn out — for my nights had been agitated and my rest broken by fearful dreams — I was roused by the welcome footstep on the staircase.  Provis, who had been asleep too, staggered up at the noise I made, and in an instant I saw his jack-knife shining in his hand.

“Quiet!  It’s Herbert!” I said; and Herbert came bursting in, with the airy freshness of six hundred miles of France upon him.

“Handel, my dear fellow, how are you, and again how are you, and again how are you?  I seem to have been gone a twelvemonth!  Why, so I must have been, for you have grown quite thin and pale!  Handel, my — Halloa!  I beg your pardon.”