“The sensation of being thus gazed at was far from pleasant, and you might suppose that my first impulse would have been to jump out of bed and hurl myself on the invisible figure attached to the eyes.  But it wasn’t—­my impulse was simply to lie still ...  I can’t say whether this was due to an immediate sense of the uncanny nature of the apparition—­to the certainty that if I did jump out of bed I should hurl myself on nothing—­or merely to the benumbing effect of the eyes themselves.  They were the very worst eyes I’ve ever seen:  a man’s eyes—­but what a man!  My first thought was that he must be frightfully old.  The orbits were sunk, and the thick red-lined lids hung over the eyeballs like blinds of which the cords are broken.  One lid drooped a little lower than the other, with the effect of a crooked leer; and between these pulpy folds of flesh, with their scant bristle of lashes, the eyes themselves, small glassy disks with an agate-like rim about the pupils, looked like sea-pebbles in the grip of a starfish.

“But the age of the eyes was not the most unpleasant thing about them.  What turned me sick was their expression of vicious security.  I don’t know how else to describe the fact that they seemed to belong to a man who had done a lot of harm in his life, but had always kept just inside the danger lines.  They were not the eyes of a coward, but of some one much too clever to take risks; and my gorge rose at their look of base astuteness.  Yet even that wasn’t the worst; for as we continued to scan each other I saw in them a tinge of faint derision, and felt myself to be its object.

“At that I was seized by an impulse of rage that jerked me out of bed and pitched me straight on the unseen figure at its foot.  But of course there wasn’t any figure there, and my fists struck at emptiness.  Ashamed and cold, I groped about for a match and lit the candles.  The room looked just as usual—­as I had known it would; and I crawled back to bed, and blew out the lights.

“As soon as the room was dark again the eyes reappeared; and I now applied myself to explaining them on scientific principles.  At first I thought the illusion might have been caused by the glow of the last embers in the chimney; but the fire-place was on the other side of my bed, and so placed that the fire could not possibly be reflected in my toilet glass, which was the only mirror in the room.  Then it occurred to me that I might have been tricked by the reflection of the embers in some polished bit of wood or metal; and though I couldn’t discover any object of the sort in my line of vision, I got up again, groped my way to the hearth, and covered what was left of the fire.  But as soon as I was back in bed the eyes were back at its foot.