Determining that I should be well-advised to sleep on the problem, I presently turned in.  And when I blew out the candle with which the chambermaid had provided me, I remember thinking that the moonlight was so bright that it would have been possible to read moderately large type without inconvenience.

I slept perhaps for two hours or more, an unrefreshing sleep disturbed by dreams of a wildly grotesque nature.  Figures increasingly horrible and menacing crowded upon me; but that which proved the culminating horror and which finally awakened me, bathed in cold perspiration, was a dream of two huge green eyes regarding me with a fixed stare, fascinating and hypnotic, against which evil power I fought in my dream with all the strength of my will.

Vaguely defined as if in smoke I could perceive the body of the creature to which these incredible eyes belonged.  It was slender and sinuous and sometimes I thought it to be that of a human being and sometimes that of an animal.  For at one moment it possessed all the lines of a woman’s form and in the next, with those terrible eyes regarding me from low down upon the ground, it had assumed the shape of a crouching beast of prey.  This fearsome apparition seemed to be creeping towards me—­nearer and nearer, and was about to spring, I thought, when I awakened as I have said and sat suddenly upright.

One thing I immediately perceived which may have accounted for my bad dreams; I had been sleeping with the moonlight shining directly upon my face.  Another thing I thought I perceived, but endeavored to assure myself that it represented the aftermath of an unpleasant nightmare.  This was a lithe shape streaking through my open window—­a figment of the imagination, as I concluded at the time, the tail-end of a dream visibly retreating in the moment of awakening.

So self-assured of this did I become, that I did not get up to investigate the matter, nor was there any sound from the road below to suggest that the figure had been otherwise than imaginary, yet I found it difficult to woo slumber again, and for nearly an hour I lay tossing from side to side, listening to the ticking of the grandfather’s clock and constantly seeing in my mind’s eye that deserted supper-room at the Red House.

And presently as I lay thus, I became aware of two things:  first of the howling of dogs, and, second, of a sort of muttered conversation which seemed to be taking place somewhere near me.  Listening intently, I thought I could distinguish the voice of a man and that of a woman.  Possibly I was not the only wakeful inhabitant of the Abbey Inn was my first and most natural idea; but it presently became apparent to me that the speakers were not in the inn, but outside in the road.

Curiosity at last overcame inclination.  Of the exact time I was not aware, but I think dawn could not have been far off, and I naturally wondered who these might be that conversed beneath my window at such an hour.  I rose quietly and crept across the room, endeavoring to avoid showing my head in the moonlight.  By the exercise of a little ingenuity I obtained a view of the road before the inn doors.