He started up and stretched himself, and taking out the neat little packet that the maid had brought from the chemist’s, he drew up a chair, and sat down once more in front of the glass. He sighed vacantly, rose and lifted down from the wall above the fireplace a tinted photograph of himself that Sheila had had enlarged about twelve years ago. It was a brighter, younger, hairier, but unmistakably the same dull indolent Lawford who had ventured into Widderstone churchyard that afternoon. The cheek was a little plumper, the eyes not quite so full-lidded, the hair a little more precisely parted, the upper lip graced with a small blonde moustache. He tilted the portrait into the candlelight, and compared it with this reflection in the glass of what had come out of Widderstone, feature with feature, with perfect composure and extreme care. Then he laid down the massive frame on the table, and gazed quietly at the tiny packet. It was to be a day of queer experiences. He had never before realized with how many miracles mere everyday life is besieged. Here in this small punctilious packet lay a Sesame—a power of transformation beside which the transformation of that rather flaccid face of the noonday into this tense, sinister face of midnight was but as a moving from house to house—a change just as irrevocable and complete, and yet so very normal. Which should it be, that, or—his face lifted itself once more to the ice-like gloom of the looking-glass—that, or this? It simply gazed back with a kind of quizzical pity on its lean features under the scrutiny of eyes so deep, so meaningful, so desolate, and yet so indomitably courageous. In the brain behind them a slow and stolid argument was in progress; the one baffling reply on the one side to every appeal on the other being still simply. ‘What dreams may come?’ Those eyes surely knew something of dreams, else, why this violent and stubborn endeavour to keep awake. Lawford did indeed once actually frame the question, ‘But who the devil are you?’ And it really seemed the eyes perceptibly widened or brightened. The mere vexation of his unparalleled position. Sheila’s pathetic incredulity, his old vicar’s laborious kindness, the tiresome network of experience into which he would be dragged struggling on the morrow, and on the morrow after that, and after that—the thought of all these things faded for the moment from his mind, lost if not their significance, at least their instancy. He simply sat face to face with the sheer difficulty of living on at all. He even concluded in a kind of lethargy that if nothing had occurred, no ‘change,’ he might still be sitting here, Arthur Rennet Lawford, in his best visitor’s room, deciding between inscrutable life and just—death. He supposed he was tired out. His thoughts hadn’t even the energy to complete themselves. None cared but himself and this—this Silence.