"Dear me!" he said, getting up and rubbing his temples with both hands. "If I hadn't had so many extraordinary experiences since my promotion to the plane of N4, I should probably be a little scared as well. But it is really astonishing how soon the trained intellect gets accustomed to anything--even the eccentricities of the fourth dimensional world. Well, well! I hope that's not the end of the adventure, I was getting quite interested. I suppose this must be in some obscure way the reason why those paragraphs in the _Pall Mall_ interested me so strangely." He walked towards the window, pulled the blind aside and looked out. But instead of his own tree-shaded lawn and the wide expanse of moonlit common beyond which he expected to see, he found himself looking, as it were, through a window from the outside into a great, oak-panelled sleeping chamber, lighted by a huge silver lamp hanging from the middle of the painted and corniced ceiling. Against the middle of the left hand side wall, as he was looking into the room, stood one of the huge, heavily-draped, four-post bedsteads in which the great ones of the earth were wont to take their rest a couple of hundred years ago. The curtains were drawn back on both sides. In the middle of the bed lay Count Zastrow, deathly white, with fast-closed eyes and lips, breathing heavily as the rise and fall of the embroidered sheet and silken coverlet which lay across his chest showed. On the right hand side stood the Countess and the two men whom he had seen before; on the other side stood a tall, strikingly handsome woman, whose dark imperious features seemed strangely at variance with the severely fashioned grey dress and the plainly arranged hair which proclaimed her either a nurse or an upper servant. He saw the elder of the two men lean over the bed and raise one of the sleeper's eyelids with his thumb. The nurse took up a lighted taper by the table beside her and passed it in front of the opened eye. The man closed the eyelid, and turned and said something to the Countess and the other man. The Countess nodded and smiled, not quite as a man likes to see a woman smile, and, with a swift glance at the motionless figure on the bed, turned away and left the room. The nurse said something to the two men, and as the door closed behind her the scene changed again. This time he was not looking into a window, but out of one. He was gazing over a vast expanse of forest pierced by a broad, straight road which led for several miles, as it seemed to him, between two dark walls of thickly-growing pines until it ended abruptly with the forest and opened out on a tiny sand-fringed inlet whose narrow mouth was guarded by two little outcrops of rock half a mile to seaward.