“Well?”

“That’s all.  He never said a word; just glared, and put his sleeve back in his pocket quickly.  ‘I was saying,’ said he, ’that there was the prescription burning, wasn’t I?’ Interrogative cough.  ‘How the devil,’ said I, ‘can you move an empty sleeve like that?’ ‘Empty sleeve?’ ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘an empty sleeve.’

“‘It’s an empty sleeve, is it?  You saw it was an empty sleeve?’ He stood up right away.  I stood up too.  He came towards me in three very slow steps, and stood quite close.  Sniffed venomously.  I didn’t flinch, though I’m hanged if that bandaged knob of his, and those blinkers, aren’t enough to unnerve any one, coming quietly up to you.

“‘You said it was an empty sleeve?’ he said.  ‘Certainly,’ I said.  At staring and saying nothing a barefaced man, unspectacled, starts scratch.  Then very quietly he pulled his sleeve out of his pocket again, and raised his arm towards me as though he would show it to me again.  He did it very, very slowly.  I looked at it.  Seemed an age.  ‘Well?’ said I, clearing my throat, ‘there’s nothing in it.’

“Had to say something.  I was beginning to feel frightened.  I could see right down it.  He extended it straight towards me, slowly, slowly—­just like that—­until the cuff was six inches from my face.  Queer thing to see an empty sleeve come at you like that!  And then—­”

“Well?”

“Something—­exactly like a finger and thumb it felt—­nipped my nose.”

Bunting began to laugh.

“There wasn’t anything there!” said Cuss, his voice running up into a shriek at the “there.”  “It’s all very well for you to laugh, but I tell you I was so startled, I hit his cuff hard, and turned around, and cut out of the room—­I left him—­”

Cuss stopped.  There was no mistaking the sincerity of his panic.  He turned round in a helpless way and took a second glass of the excellent vicar’s very inferior sherry.  “When I hit his cuff,” said Cuss, “I tell you, it felt exactly like hitting an arm.  And there wasn’t an arm!  There wasn’t the ghost of an arm!”

Mr. Bunting thought it over.  He looked suspiciously at Cuss.  “It’s a most remarkable story,” he said.  He looked very wise and grave indeed.  “It’s really,” said Mr. Bunting with judicial emphasis, “a most remarkable story.”

CHAPTER V

THE BURGLARY AT THE VICARAGE

The facts of the burglary at the vicarage came to us chiefly through the medium of the vicar and his wife.  It occurred in the small hours of Whit Monday, the day devoted in Iping to the Club festivities.  Mrs. Bunting, it seems, woke up suddenly in the stillness that comes before the dawn, with the strong impression that the door of their bedroom had opened and closed.  She did not arouse her husband at first, but sat up in bed listening.  She then distinctly heard the pad, pad, pad of bare feet coming out of the adjoining dressing-room and walking along the passage towards the staircase.  As soon as she felt assured of this, she aroused the Rev. Mr. Bunting as quietly as possible.  He did not strike a light, but putting on his spectacles, her dressing-gown and his bath slippers, he went out on the landing to listen.  He heard quite distinctly a fumbling going on at his study desk down-stairs, and then a violent sneeze.