But my tormentor was not yet at an end with me.

As I stood there, like some broken and beaten hack, waiting for the word of command, it came.  It was as if some strong magnetic current had been switched on to me through the window to draw me into the room.  Over the low wall I went, over the sill,—­once more I stood in that chamber of my humiliation and my shame.  And once again I was conscious of that awful sense of the presence of an evil thing.  How much of it was fact, and how much of it was the product of imagination I cannot say; but, looking back, it seems to me that it was as if I had been taken out of the corporeal body to be plunged into the inner chambers of all nameless sin.  There was the sound of something flopping from off the bed on to the ground, and I knew that the thing was coming at me across the floor.  My stomach quaked, my heart melted within me,—­the very anguish of my terror gave me strength to scream,—­and scream!  Sometimes, even now, I seem to hear those screams of mine ringing through the night, and I bury my face in the pillow, and it is as though I was passing through the very Valley of the Shadow.

The thing went back,—­I could hear it slipping and sliding across the floor.  There was silence.  And, presently, the lamp was lit, and the room was all in brightness.  There, on the bed, in the familiar attitude between the sheets, his head resting on his hand, his eyes blazing like living coals, was the dreadful cause of all my agonies.  He looked at me with his unpitying, unblinking glance.

’So!—­Through the window again!—­like a thief!—­Is it always through that door that you come into a house?’

He paused,—­as if to give me time to digest his gibe.

’You saw Paul Lessingham,—­well?—­the great Paul Lessingham!—­Was he, then, so great?’

His rasping voice, with its queer foreign twang, reminded me, in some uncomfortable way, of a rusty saw,—­the things he said, and the manner in which he said them, were alike intended to add to my discomfort.  It was solely because the feat was barely possible that he only partially succeeded.

’Like a thief you went into his house,—­did I not tell you that you would?  Like a thief he found you,—­were you not ashamed?  Since, like a thief he found you, how comes it that you have escaped,—­by what robber’s artifice have you saved yourself from gaol?’

His manner changed,—­so that, all at once, he seemed to snarl at me.

’Is he great?—­well!—­is he great,—­Paul Lessingham?  You are small, but he is smaller,—­your great Paul Lessingham!—­Was there ever a man so less than nothing?’

With the recollection fresh upon me of Mr Lessingham as I had so lately seen him I could not but feel that there might be a modicum of truth in what, with such an intensity of bitterness, the speaker suggested.  The picture which, in my mental gallery, I had hung in the place of honour, seemed, to say the least, to have become a trifle smudged.