“There they hung in the darkness, their swollen lids dropped across the little watery bulbs rolling loose in the orbits, and the puff of fat flesh making a muddy shadow underneath—­and as their filmy stare moved with my movements, there came over me a sense of their tacit complicity, of a deep hidden understanding between us that was worse than the first shock of their strangeness.  Not that I understood them; but that they made it so clear that some day I should ...  Yes, that was the worst part of it, decidedly; and it was the feeling that became stronger each time they came back to me ...

“For they got into the damnable habit of coming back.  They reminded me of vampires with a taste for young flesh, they seemed so to gloat over the taste of a good conscience.  Every night for a month they came to claim their morsel of mine:  since I’d made Gilbert happy they simply wouldn’t loosen their fangs.  The coincidence almost made me hate him, poor lad, fortuitous as I felt it to be.  I puzzled over it a good deal, but couldn’t find any hint of an explanation except in the chance of his association with Alice Nowell.  But then the eyes had let up on me the moment I had abandoned her, so they could hardly be the emissaries of a woman scorned, even if one could have pictured poor Alice charging such spirits to avenge her.  That set me thinking, and I began to wonder if they would let up on me if I abandoned Gilbert.  The temptation was insidious, and I had to stiffen myself against it; but really, dear boy! he was too charming to be sacrificed to such demons.  And so, after all, I never found out what they wanted ...”

III

THE fire crumbled, sending up a flash which threw into relief the narrator’s gnarled red face under its grey-black stubble.  Pressed into the hollow of the dark leather armchair, it stood out an instant like an intaglio of yellowish red-veined stone, with spots of enamel for the eyes; then the fire sank and in the shaded lamp-light it became once more a dim Rembrandtish blur.

Phil Frenham, sitting in a low chair on the opposite side of the hearth, one long arm propped on the table behind him, one hand supporting his thrown-back head, and his eyes steadily fixed on his old friend’s face, had not moved since the tale began.  He continued to maintain his silent immobility after Culwin had ceased to speak, and it was I who, with a vague sense of disappointment at the sudden drop of the story, finally asked:  “But how long did you keep on seeing them?”

Culwin, so sunk into his chair that he seemed like a heap of his own empty clothes, stirred a little, as if in surprise at my question.  He appeared to have half-forgotten what he had been telling us.

“How long?  Oh, off and on all that winter.  It was infernal.  I never got used to them.  I grew really ill.”

Frenham shifted his attitude silently, and as he did so his elbow struck against a small mirror in a bronze frame standing on the table behind him.  He turned and changed its angle slightly; then he resumed his former attitude, his dark head thrown back on his lifted palm, his eyes intent on Culwin’s face.  Something in his stare embarrassed me, and as if to divert attention from it I pressed on with another question: