“Sir, you heap coals of fire on me.”

“Believe me that for ninety-nine of your qualities I do not care a tinker’s curse; but for your palate you are to be taken care of.”

He shuffled away, but came back in a couple of minutes with the nightshirt.

“Good-night,” he called to me, flinging it in at the door; and without giving me time to return the wish, went his way up-stairs.

Now it might be supposed I was only too glad to toss off my clothes and climb into the bed I had so unexpectedly acquired a right to.  But, as a matter of fact, I did nothing of the kind.  Instead, I drew on my boots and sat on the bed’s edge, blinking at my candle till it died down in its socket, and afterwards at the purple square of window as it slowly changed to grey with the coming of dawn.  I was cold to the heart, and my teeth chattered with an ague.  Certainly I never suspected my host’s word; but was even occupied in framing good resolutions and shaping out a reputable future, when I heard the front door gently pulled to, and a man’s footsteps moving quietly to the gate.

The treachery knocked me in a heap for the moment.  Then, leaping up and flinging my door wide, I stumbled through the uncertain light of the passage into the front hall.  There was a fan-shaped light over the door, and the place was very still and grey.  A quick thought, or, rather, a sudden, prophetic guess at the truth, made me turn to the figure of the mastiff curled under the hall table.

I laid my hand on the scruff of his neck.  He was quite limp, and my fingers sank into the flesh on either side of the vertebrae.  Digging them deeper, I dragged him out into the middle of the hall and pulled the front door open to see the better.

His throat was gashed from ear to ear.

How many seconds passed after I dropped the senseless lump on the floor, and before I made another movement, it would puzzle me to say.  Twice I stirred a foot as if to run out at the door.  Then, changing my mind, I stepped over the mastiff, and ran up the staircase.

The passage at the top was now dark; but groping down it, I found the study door open, as before, and passed in.  A sick light stole through the blinds—­enough for me to distinguish the glasses and decanters on the table, and find my way to the curtain that hung before the inner room.

I pushed the curtain aside, paused for a moment, and listened to the violent beat of my heart; then felt for the door-handle and turned it.

All I could see at first was that the chamber was small; next, that the light patch in a line with the window was the white coverlet of a bed; and next that somebody, or something, lay on the bed.

I listened again.  There was no sound in the room; no heart beating but my own.  I reached out a hand to pull up the blind, and drew it back again.  I dared not.

The daylight grew minute by minute on the dull oblong of the blind, and minute by minute that horrible thing on the bed took something of distinctness.