"You understand English, don't you?" I told him. "You heard me say get out, didn't you?" He stared at me, with that black scowl of his, for a full half minute. Then he turned on his heel and stalked out of the room. I wasn't sorry to see him go, but I knew, as he went, that he was carrying away with him something precious. He was carrying away with him my peace of mind for that whole blessed night. Sleep, I knew, was out of the question. It would be foolish even to attempt to court it. I felt the familiar neurasthenic call for open spaces, the necessity for physical freedom and fresh air. And it was that, I suppose, which took me wandering off toward the water-front, where I sat on a string-piece smoking my seventh cigarette and thinking of Creegan and his singed cat as I watched the light-spangled Hudson. I had squatted there for a full half-hour, I think, before I became even vaguely conscious of the other presence so near me. I had no clear-cut memory of that figure's advent. I had no impression of its movement about my immediate neighborhood, I feel sure, until my self-absorbed meditations were broken into by the discovery that the stranger on the same wharf where I loitered had quietly and deliberately risen to an erect position. It startled me a little, in fact, to find that he was standing at one end of the same string-piece where I sat. Then something about the figure brought a slow perplexity into my mind, as I lounged there inhaling the musky harbor-odors, under a sky that seemed Italian in its serenity, and a soft and silvery moon that made the shuttling ferries into shadows scaled with Roman gold. This perplexity grew into bewilderment, for as I studied the lean figure with its loose-fitting paddock-coat flapping in the wharf-end breeze I was reminded of something disturbing, of something awesome. The gaunt form so voluminously draped, the cadaverous face with the startlingly sunken cheeks, the touch of tragedy in the entire attitude, brought sharply and suddenly to my mind the thought of a shrouded and hollow-eyed symbol of Death, needing only the scythe of honored tradition to translate it into the finished picture. He stood there for some time, without moving, studying the water that ran like seamless black velvet under the wharf-end. Then he slowly took off his coat, folded it and placed it on the string-piece, and on top of this again placed his hat. Then he laughed audibly. I looked away, dreading that some spoken triviality might spoil a picture so appealingly mysterious. When I next peered up at him he seemed engaged in the absurd occupation of slowly turning inside out the quite empty pockets of his clothing. Then he once more looked down at the black water.