“Please sit down a while,” I said.  “You have evidently been seriously alarmed.”

Still there was no sign from Coates, whose voice would have been welcome music to my ears, for I could not reconcile myself to this woman’s presence, strive how I might, nor could I understand how she had come to be wandering alone in such a place at that hour.  One bond of sympathy there was between us.  I could forgive any one fearing those awful eyes, for I had feared them myself; and I could no longer doubt that some strange apparition was haunting the vicinity.

“Believe me, I quite understand,” I said, turning to my visitor.  “It is most extraordinary, but I believe there is some unusually large cat frequenting the neighborhood at present.”

I stood by the side table and was on the point of pouring out a glass of water when the woman raised her white-gloved hand in a gesture of refusal.

“Thank you,” she said, “thank you, but I am quite recovered, and indeed if the cause of my alarm is no more than a cat, as you say, I will proceed.”

She laughed, and her laughter was low-pitched, but very musical.  In the light of the shaded table-lamp I could see the gleam of white teeth through her veil, but I could not imagine why she swathed herself in that manner.  Yet in spite of this enwrapping she could not disguise the fact that she possessed remarkably large and beautiful eyes.  She seemed now to have recovered her composure, but I noted that she made no attempt to remove her veil.

“Are you quite sure that you will not be nervous on your way?” I asked.

“Oh, no.  I am staying with some friends quite near,” she explained, detecting my curiosity; “and I was indiscreet enough to wander out at this hour to post a letter.”

Possibly this explanation might have satisfied me; it is even possible that I should have thought little more about the incident at that time when I lived in a constant turmoil of episodes even stranger, but by one of those accidents which sometimes seem to be directed by the hand of an impish fate, I was to learn who or what my visitor was.  When I say I was to learn what she was, perhaps I err; more correctly I was to learn what she was not, namely, an ordinary human being.

It was as she rose to depart that the hand of fate intervened.  I had only one lamp burning in the room, a table-lamp; and at this moment, preceded by a sudden accession of light due to some flaw of the generating plant, the filament expired, plunging the room into darkness!  I stood up with a startled cry.  I do not deny that I felt ill at ease in the gloom with my strange visitor; but worse was to come.  Looking across the darkened room to the chair upon which she was seated, I saw a pair of blazing eyes regarding me fixedly!

Something in their horrid, luminous watchfulness told me that my slightest movement was perceptible to my uncanny visitor of whom I could see nothing but those two fiery eyes.