The awful thrill of a suspicion which I hardly knew yet for what it really was, began to creep over me—­to creep like a dead-cold touch crawling through and through me to the heart.  I looked up at the house.  It was an hotel—­a neglected, deserted, dreary-looking building.  Still acting mechanically; still with no definite impulse that I could recognise, even if I felt it, except the instinctive resolution to follow them into the house, as I had already followed them through the street—­I walked up to the door, and rang the bell.

It was answered by a waiter—­a mere lad.  As the light in the passage fell on my face, he paused in the act of addressing me, and drew back a few steps.  Without stopping for any explanations, I closed the door behind me, and said to him at once: 

“A lady and gentleman came into this hotel a little while ago.”

“What may your business be?”—­He hesitated, and added in an altered tone, “I mean, what may you want with them, Sir?”

“I want you to take me where I can hear their voices, and I want nothing more.  Here’s a sovereign for you, if you do what I ask.”

His eyes fastened covetously on the gold, as I held it before them.  He retired a few steps on tiptoe, and listened at the end of the passage.  I heard nothing but the thick, rapid beating of my own heart.  He came back, muttering to himself:  “Master’s safe at supper down stairs—­I’ll risk it!  You’ll promise to go away directly,” he added, whispering to me, “and not disturb the house?  We are quiet people here, and can’t have anything like a disturbance.  Just say at once, will you promise to step soft, and not speak a word?”

“I promise.”

“This way then, Sir—­and mind you don’t forget to step soft.”

A strange coldness and stillness, an icy insensibility, a dream-sensation of being impelled by some hidden, irresistible agency, possessed me, as I followed him upstairs.  He showed me softly into an empty room; pointed to one of the walls, whispering, “It’s only boards papered over—­” and then waited, keeping his eyes anxiously and steadily fixed upon all my movements.

I listened; and through the thin partition, I heard voices—­her voice, and his voice. I heard and I knew—­knew my degradation in all its infamy, knew my wrongs in all their nameless horror.  He was exulting in the patience and secrecy which had brought success to the foul plot, foully hidden for months on months; foully hidden until the very day before I was to have claimed as my wife, a wretch as guilty as himself!

I could neither move nor breathe.  The blood surged and heaved upward to my brain; my heart strained and writhed in anguish; the life within me raged and tore to get free.  Whole years of the direst mental and bodily agony were concentrated in that one moment of helpless, motionless torment.  I never lost the consciousness of suffering.  I heard the waiter say, under his breath, “My God! he’s dying.”  I felt him loosen my cravat—­I knew that he dashed cold water over me; dragged me out of the room; and, opening a window on the landing, held me firmly where the night-air blew upon my face.  I knew all this; and knew when the paroxysm passed, and nothing remained of it, but a shivering helplessness in every limb.