In answer to my note apprising him of my wish to call, Dampier had written, “Don’t ring—­open the door and come up.”  I did so.  The staircase was dimly lighted by a single gas-jet at the top of the second flight.  I managed to reach the landing without disaster and entered by an open door into the lighted square room of the tower.  Dampier came forward in gown and slippers to receive me, giving me the greeting that I wished, and if I had held a thought that it might more fitly have been accorded me at the front door the first look at him dispelled any sense of his inhospitality.

He was not the same.  Hardly past middle age, he had gone gray and had acquired a pronounced stoop.  His figure was thin and angular, his face deeply lined, his complexion dead-white, without a touch of color.  His eyes, unnaturally large, glowed with a fire that was almost uncanny.

He seated me, proffered a cigar, and with grave and obvious sincerity assured me of the pleasure that it gave him to meet me.  Some unimportant conversation followed, but all the while I was dominated by a melancholy sense of the great change in him.  This he must have perceived, for he suddenly said with a bright enough smile, “You are disappointed in me—­non sum qualis eram.”

I hardly knew what to reply, but managed to say:  “Why, really, I don’t know:  your Latin is about the same.”

He brightened again.  “No,” he said, “being a dead language, it grows in appropriateness.  But please have the patience to wait:  where I am going there is perhaps a better tongue.  Will you care to have a message in it?”

The smile faded as he spoke, and as he concluded he was looking into my eyes with a gravity that distressed me.  Yet I would not surrender myself to his mood, nor permit him to see how deeply his prescience of death affected me.

“I fancy that it will be long,” I said, “before human speech will cease to serve our need; and then the need, with its possibilities of service, will have passed.”

He made no reply, and I too was silent, for the talk had taken a dispiriting turn, yet I knew not how to give it a more agreeable character.  Suddenly, in a pause of the storm, when the dead silence was almost startling by contrast with the previous uproar, I heard a gentle tapping, which appeared to come from the wall behind my chair.  The sound was such as might have been made by a human hand, not as upon a door by one asking admittance, but rather, I thought, as an agreed signal, an assurance of someone’s presence in an adjoining room; most of us, I fancy, have had more experience of such communications than we should care to relate.  I glanced at Dampier.  If possibly there was something of amusement in the look he did not observe it.  He appeared to have forgotten my presence, and was staring at the wall behind me with an expression in his eyes that I am unable to name, although my memory of it is as vivid to-day as was my sense of it then.  The situation was embarrassing; I rose to take my leave.  At this he seemed to recover himself.