knelt on the floor, and, turning my head towards the door, I called out— “Vernon! Vernon!” Instantly the door opened and Vernon appeared. The dog looked as he had looked when he was being brought into the house. “Vernon,” I said, “you’re a d⸺d blackguard!” “Why?” he said. “This dog is starving. You’re starving him! D’you hear? You’re starving him!” “I know I am,” he answered. I got up. The spaniel rushed against my legs and leaned against them as I stood. “Then Gernham was right,” I said. “You are a madman.” “Is it madness to see what is when others are blind to it?” “To see—to see?” I exclaimed. “What is there to see but this dog, this spaniel that you are torturing?” “There is this spaniel—yes. Look at him. Look into his eyes. Look at the soul in them.” There was something compelling, something almost mystical, in his voice. I looked down into the yellow eyes of the spaniel. They met mine, then looked away from mine as if unable to bear my gaze. “What is it?” I said, in a whisper. “What is it?” Again I was assailed by the sensation which had come to me when I waited in the hall to know if Vernon would receive me, a sensation that, with the black spaniel, linked with it, mysteriously mingled with it, was something of the man who was dead—something of Deeming. “Deeming!” I stammered. “Deeming!” I did not know what I meant, but I was compelled to pronounce the name of my friend. “Deeming?” I said once more, looking towards Vernon. “Don’t you feel that he is here?” said Vernon. “But he is dead.” “Don’t you feel that he is here?” “Yes,” I said. “But it can’t be. He is dead.” “His body is dead—yes. But his soul, is that dead?” When he said that, I understood what he meant, and I recoiled from the black spaniel as from a nameless horror. “Vernon!” I said. “Vernon!” “Do you understand now?” he asked. “Do you understand why I bought the spaniel, why I have kept the spaniel here in the house where he tortured his dog? It was to punish him as he punished it, to torture him as he tortured it. Directly I saw the spaniel crouching down in the Park, directly I looked into his eyes, I knew. Deeming died on the 30th of June, the spaniel was born on that very day. The soul of the dog-torturer passed at the death of the body of the man into the body of the dog. I am not mad—no. I am only just. I am the instrument of the justice of Providence. Deeming’s soul has been sent back into the world to pay its penalty. And I am here to see that the penalty is paid.” There was blazing in his eyes the light which I had seen in them for the first time in the restaurant in Rome, the light which had made Deeming say that in Vernon there was the spirit of a black fanatic. “It’s not true!” I said. “It can’t be true!” “But Lord Elyn has felt it, Cragg has felt it, you have felt it—the strangeness of the spaniel. You know now, you know that what I say is true. Deny that you know it is true! Deny it then!”