Fletcher executed his commission and then went upstairs to his office.  His fellow-clerks at once asked what had happened to him, for he was looking white.  He said that he had a headache and was not feeling quite himself, but made no further explanations.

This last experience changed the whole tenor of his life.  When fits of abstraction had occurred to him before he had not troubled about them, and after his first strange experience he had felt only vaguely interested; but now it was a different matter.  He was consumed with dread lest the thing should occur again.  He did not want to get back to that green world and that oily sea; he did not want to hear the whistling noise, and to be pursued by an invisible enemy.  So much did the dread of this weigh on him that he refused to go to the telephone lest the act of telephoning should set alight in his mind the train of associations and bring his thoughts back to his dreadful experience.

Shortly after this he went for leave, and following the doctor’s advice he spent it by the sea.  During all this time he was perfectly well, and was not once troubled by his curious fits.  He returned to London in the autumn refreshed and well.

On the first day that he went to the office a friend of his telephoned to him.  When he was told that the line was being held for him he hesitated, but at last he went down to the telephone office.

He remained away twenty minutes.  Finally his prolonged absence was noticed, and he was sent for.  He was found in the telephone room stiff and unconscious, having fallen forward on the telephone desk.  His face was quite white, and his eyes wide open and glazed with an expression of piteous and harrowing terror.  When they tried to revive him their efforts were in vain.  A doctor was sent for, and he said that Fletcher had died of heart disease.

THE FIRE

Before the bell had time to sound the alarm a huge pillar of smoke and flame, leaping high in the breathless August night, told the whole village the news of the fire.  Men, women, and children hurried to the burning place.  The firemen galloped down the rutty road with their barrels of water and hand-pumps, yelling.  The bell rang, with hurried, throbbing beats.  The fire, which was further off than it seemed to be at first sight, was in the middle of the village.  Two houses were burning—­a house built of bricks and a wooden cottage.  The flame was prodigious:  it soared into the sky like the eruption of a volcano, and the wooden cottage, with its flat logs and blazing roof, looked like a sacrificial pyre consuming the body of some warrior or Viking.  In the light of the flames the soft sky, which was starless and flooded with stillness by the large full moon, had turned from blue to green.  A dense crowd had gathered round the burning houses.