It went on its back, with a dusty slap on the stone flags, and from all its spectators—­me included—­came a sudden drawn sound, like wind in a keyhole.

What can I say, or how describe it?  A dead thing it was—­but the face!

Barred with livid scars where the grating rails had crossed it, the rest seemed to have been worked and kneaded into a mere featureless plate of yellow and expressionless flesh.

And it was this I had seen in the glass!

* * * * *

There was an interval following the experience above narrated, during which a certain personality that had once been mine was effaced or suspended, and I seemed a passive creature, innocent of the least desire of independence.  It was not that I was actually ill or actually insane.  A merciful Providence set my finer wits slumbering, that was all, leaving me a sufficiency of the grosser faculties that were necessary to the right ordering of my behaviour.

I kept to my room, it is true, and even lay a good deal in bed; but this was more to satisfy the busy scruples of a locum tenens—­a practitioner of the neighbourhood, who came daily to the prison to officiate in my absence—­than to cosset a complaint that in its inactivity was purely negative.  I could review what had happened with a calmness as profound as if I had read of it in a book.  I could have wished to continue my duties, indeed, had the power of insistence remained to me.  But the saner medicus was acute where I had gone blunt, and bade me to the restful course.  He was right.  I was mentally stunned, and had I not slept off my lethargy, I should have gone mad in an hour—­leapt at a bound, probably, from inertia to flaming lunacy.

I remembered everything, but through a fluffy atmosphere, so to speak.  It was as if I looked on bygone pictures through ground glass that softened the ugly outlines.

Sometimes I referred to these to my substitute, who was wise to answer me according to my mood; for the truth left me unruffled, whereas an obvious evasion of it would have distressed me.

“Hammond,” I said one day, “I have never yet asked you.  How did I give my evidence at the inquest?”

“Like a doctor and a sane man.”

“That’s good.  But it was a difficult course to steer.  You conducted the post-mortem.  Did any peculiarity in the dead man’s face strike you?”

“Nothing but this:  that the excessive contraction of the bicipital muscles had brought the features into such forcible contact with the bars as to cause bruising and actual abrasion.  He must have been dead some little time when you found him.”

“And nothing else?  You noticed nothing else in his face—­a sort of obliteration of what makes one human, I mean?”

“Oh, dear, no! nothing but the painful constriction that marks any ordinary fatal attack of angina pectoris.—­There’s a rum breach of promise case in the paper to-day.  You should read it; it’ll make you laugh.”