He shook his head slowly. The swagger of the poise was gone; he stood upright now with a positive effort, as if the realization of his position had suddenly surged over him. "I do not know," he said quietly. "It is a childish fear--fear of the dark, you may call it. The cause does not matter; but if something does not take this unholy terror away, the effect will be madness." I watched him in silence for a moment, studying the shrunken outline of his face and the unsteady gleam of his narrowed eyes. I had seen this man before. All London had seen him. His face was constantly appearing in the sporting pages, a swaggering member of the upper set--a man who had been engaged to nearly every beautiful woman in the country--who sought adventure in sport and in night life, merely for the sake of living at top speed. And here he stood before me, whitened by fear, the very thing he had so deliberately laughed at! "Dale," he said slowly, "for the past week I have been thinking things that I do not want to think and doing things completely against my will. Some outside power--God knows what it is--is controlling my very existence." He stared at me, and leaned closer across the table. "Last night, some time before midnight," he told me, "I was sitting alone in my den. Alone, mind you--not a soul was in the house with me. I was reading a novel; and suddenly, as if a living presence had stood in the room and commanded me, I was forced to put the book down. I fought against it, fought to remain in that room and go on reading. And I failed." "Failed?" My reply was a single word of wonder. * * * * * "I left my home: because I could not help myself. Have you ever been under hypnotism, Dale? Yes? Well, the thing that gripped me was something similar--except that no living person came near me in order to work his hypnotic spell. I went alone, the whole way. Through back streets, alleys, filthy dooryards--never once striking a main thoroughfare--until I had crossed the entire city and reached the west side of the square. And there, before a big gray town-house, I was allowed to stop my mad wandering. The power, whatever it was, broke. I--well, I went home." Sir John got to his feet with an effort, and stood over me. "Dale," he whispered hoarsely, "what was it?" "You were conscious of every detail?" I asked. "Conscious of the time, of the locality you went to? You are sure it was not some fantastic dream?" "Dream! Is it a dream to have some damnable force move me about like a mechanical robot?" "But.... You can think of no explanation?" I was a bit skeptical of his story. He turned on me savagely.