other fled, squeaking as with pain.  While I listened, with strained attention, for the next episode in this queer drama, expecting that now would come another assault upon the window, to my unbounded surprise I heard a key thrust in the keyhole, the lock turned, and the front door thrown open with a furious bang.  It was closed as loudly as it was opened.  Then the door of the room in which I was, was dashed open, with the same display of excitement, and of clamour, footsteps came hurrying in, the door was slammed to with a force which shook the house to its foundations, there was a rustling as of bed-clothes, the brilliant illumination of the night before, and a voice, which I had only too good reason to remember said,

‘Stand up.’

I stood up, automatically, at the word of command, facing towards the bed.

There, between the sheets, with his head resting on his hand, in the attitude in which I had seen him last, was the being I had made acquaintance with under circumstances which I was never likely to forget,—­the same, yet not the same.

CHAPTER V

AN INSTRUCTION TO COMMIT BURGLARY

That the man in the bed was the one whom, to my cost, I had suffered myself to stumble on the night before, there could, of course, not be the faintest doubt.  And yet, directly I saw him, I recognised that some astonishing alteration had taken place in his appearance.  To begin with, he seemed younger,—­the decrepitude of age had given place to something very like the fire of youth.  His features had undergone some subtle change.  His nose, for instance, was not by any means so grotesque; its beak-like quality was less conspicuous.  The most part of his wrinkles had disappeared, as if by magic.  And, though his skin was still as yellow as saffron, his contours had rounded,—­he had even come into possession of a modest allowance of chin.  But the most astounding novelty was that about the face there was something which was essentially feminine; so feminine, indeed, that I wondered if I could by any possibility have blundered, and mistaken a woman for a man; some ghoulish example of her sex, who had so yielded to her depraved instincts as to have become nothing but a ghastly reminiscence of womanhood.

The effect of the changes which had come about in his appearance—­ for, after all, I told myself that it was impossible that I could have been such a simpleton as to have been mistaken on such a question as gender—­was heightened by the self-evident fact that, very recently, he had been engaged in some pitched battle; some hand to hand, and, probably, discreditable encounter, from which he had borne away uncomfortable proofs of his opponent’s prowess.  His antagonist could hardly have been a chivalrous fighter, for his countenance was marked by a dozen different scratches which seemed to suggest that the weapons used had been someone’s finger-nails.