It then occurred to me as possible that

the man might have slipped into my rooms; so, lighting my candle at

the watchman's, and leaving him standing at the door, I examined

them carefully, including the room in which my dreaded guest lay

asleep. All was quiet, and assuredly no other man was in those

chambers.

It troubled me that there should have been a lurker on the stairs,

on that night of all nights in the year, and I asked the watchman,

on the chance of eliciting some hopeful explanation as I handed him

a dram at the door, whether he had admitted at his gate any

gentleman who had perceptibly been dining out? Yes, he said; at

different times of the night, three. One lived in Fountain Court,

and the other two lived in the Lane, and he had seen them all go

home. Again, the only other man who dwelt in the house of which my

chambers formed a part, had been in the country for some weeks; and

he certainly had not returned in the night, because we had seen his

door with his seal on it as we came up-stairs.

"The night being so bad, sir," said the watchman, as he gave me

back my glass, "uncommon few have come in at my gate. Besides them

three gentlemen that I have named, I don't call to mind another

since about eleven o'clock, when a stranger asked for you."

"My uncle," I muttered. "Yes."

"You saw him, sir?"

"Yes. Oh yes."

"Likewise the person with him?"

"Person with him!" I repeated.

"I judged the person to be with him," returned the watchman. "The

person stopped, when he stopped to make inquiry of me, and the

person took this way when he took this way."

"What sort of person?"

The watchman had not particularly noticed; he should say a working

person; to the best of his belief, he had a dust-coloured kind of

clothes on, under a dark coat. The watchman made more light of the

matter than I did, and naturally; not having my reason for

attaching weight to it.

When I had got rid of him, which I thought it well to do without

prolonging explanations, my mind was much troubled by these two

circumstances taken together. Whereas they were easy of innocent

solution apart - as, for instance, some diner-out or diner-at-home,

who had not gone near this watchman's gate, might have strayed to

my staircase and dropped asleep there - and my nameless visitor

might have brought some one with him to show him the way - still,

joined, they had an ugly look to one as prone to distrust and fear

as the changes of a few hours had made me.

I lighted my fire, which burnt with a raw pale flare at that time

of the morning, and fell into a doze before it. I seemed to have

been dozing a whole night when the clocks struck six. As there was

full an hour and a half between me and daylight, I dozed again;

now, waking up uneasily, with prolix conversations about nothing,

in my ears; now, making thunder of the wind in the chimney; at

length, falling off into a profound sleep from which the daylight

woke me with a start.

All this time I had never been able to consider my own situation,

nor could I do so yet. I had not the power to attend to it. I was

greatly dejected and distressed, but in an incoherent wholesale

sort of way. As to forming any plan for the future, I could as soon

have formed an elephant. When I opened the shutters and looked out

at the wet wild morning, all of a leaden hue; when I walked from

room to room; when I sat down again shivering, before the fire,

waiting for my laundress to appear; I thought how miserable I was,

but hardly knew why, or how long I had been so, or on what day of

the week I made the reflection, or even who I was that made it.

At last, the old woman and the niece came in - the latter with a

head not easily distinguishable from her dusty broom - and

testified surprise at sight of me and the fire. To whom I imparted

how my uncle had come in the night and was then asleep, and how the

breakfast preparations were to be modified accordingly.