‘I am not deaf,’ he said aloud.  ’I am only insane.  My mind has quitted me for ever.’

He looked uneasily about the room, and—­gazed with lacklustre eyes at the chair in which Mr Dickson had installed himself.  The end of a cigar lay near on the fender.

‘No,’ he thought, ’I don’t believe that was a dream; but God knows my mind is failing rapidly.  I seem to be hungry, for instance; it’s probably another hallucination.  Still I might try.  I shall have one more good meal; I shall go to the Cafe Royal, and may possibly be removed from there direct to the asylum.’

He wondered with morbid interest, as he descended the stairs, how he would first betray his terrible condition—­would he attack a waiter? or eat glass?—­and when he had mounted into a cab, he bade the man drive to Nichol’s, with a lurking fear that there was no such place.

The flaring, gassy entrance of the cafe speedily set his mind at rest; he was cheered besides to recognize his favourite waiter; his orders appeared to be coherent; the dinner, when it came, was quite a sensible meal, and he ate it with enjoyment.  ‘Upon my word,’ he reflected, ’I am about tempted to indulge a hope.  Have I been hasty?  Have I done what Robert Skill would have done?’ Robert Skill (I need scarcely mention) was the name of the principal character in Who Put Back the Clock?  It had occurred to the author as a brilliant and probable invention; to readers of a critical turn, Robert appeared scarce upon a level with his surname; but it is the difficulty of the police romance, that the reader is always a man of such vastly greater ingenuity than the writer.  In the eyes of his creator, however, Robert Skill was a word to conjure with; the thought braced and spurred him; what that brilliant creature would have done Gideon would do also.  This frame of mind is not uncommon; the distressed general, the baited divine, the hesitating author, decide severally to do what Napoleon, what St Paul, what Shakespeare would have done; and there remains only the minor question, What is that?  In Gideon’s case one thing was clear:  Skill was a man of singular decision, he would have taken some step (whatever it was) at once; and the only step that Gideon could think of was to return to his chambers.

This being achieved, all further inspiration failed him, and he stood pitifully staring at the instrument of his confusion.  To touch the keys again was more than he durst venture on; whether they had maintained their former silence, or responded with the tones of the last trump, it would have equally dethroned his resolution.  ’It may be a practical jest,’ he reflected, ’though it seems elaborate and costly.  And yet what else can it be?  It must be a practical jest.’  And just then his eye fell upon a feature which seemed corroborative of that view:  the pagoda of cigars which Michael had erected ere he left the chambers.  ‘Why that?’ reflected Gideon.  ‘It seems