The dog was Strickland’s dog, so I said nothing, but I felt all that Strickland felt In being thus made light of.  Tietjens encamped outside my bedroom window, and storm after storm came up, thundered on the thatch, and died away.  The lightning spattered the sky as a thrown egg spatters a barn-door, but the light was pale blue, not yellow; and, looking through my split bamboo blinds, I could see the great dog standing, not sleeping, in the verandah, the hackles alift on her back and her feet anchored as tensely as the drawn wire-rope of a suspension bridge.  In the very short pauses of the thunder I tried to sleep, but it seemed that some one wanted me very urgently.  He, whoever he was, was trying to call me by name, but his voice was no more than a husky whisper.  The thunder ceased, and Tietjens went into the garden and howled at the low moon.  Somebody tried to open my door, walked about and about through the house and stood breathing heavily in the verandahs, and just when I was falling asleep I fancied that I heard a wild hammering and clamouring above my head or on the door.

I ran into Strickland’s room and asked him whether he was ill, and had been calling for me.  He was lying on his bed half dressed, a pipe in his mouth.  ‘I thought you’d come,’ he said.  ’Have I been walking round the house recently?’

I explained that he had been tramping in the dining-room and the smoking-room and two or three other places, and he laughed and told me to go back to bed.  I went back to bed and slept till the morning, but through all my mixed dreams I was sure I was doing some one an injustice in not attending to his wants.  What those wants were I could not tell; but a fluttering, whispering, bolt-fumbling, lurking, loitering Someone was reproaching me for my slackness, and, half awake, I heard the howling of Tietjens in the garden and the threshing of the rain.

I lived in that house for two days.  Strickland went to his office daily, leaving me alone for eight or ten hours with Tietjens for my only companion.  As long as the full light lasted I was comfortable, and so was Tietjens; but in the twilight she and I moved into the back verandah and cuddled each other for company.  We were alone in the house, but none the less it was much too fully occupied by a tenant with whom I did not wish to interfere.  I never saw him, but I could see the curtains between the rooms quivering where he had just passed through; I could hear the chairs creaking as the bamboos sprung under a weight that had just quitted them; and I could feel when I went to get a book from the dining-room that somebody was waiting in the shadows of the front verandah till I should have gone away.  Tietjens made the twilight more interesting by glaring into the darkened rooms with every hair erect, and following the motions of something that I could not see.  She never entered the rooms, but her eyes moved interestedly:  that was quite sufficient.  Only when my servant came to trim the lamps and make all light and habitable she would come in with me and spend her time sitting on her haunches, watching an invisible extra man as he moved about behind my shoulder.  Dogs are cheerful companions.