Like many another highly educated man of our time, Megbie knew that there are strange and little-understood forces all round us. When an ex-Prime Minister is a keen investigator into the psychic, when the principal of Birmingham University, a leading scientist, writes constantly in dispute of the mere material aspect of life--the cultured world follows suit. Megbie held the cigarette-case in his hand. All the electric lights burned steadily. The door was closed and there was not a sound in the flat. Then, with absolute suddenness, Megbie saw that a man was standing in front of him, at the other side of the fireplace, not three yards away. He was a tall man, clean-shaven, with light close-cropped hair and a rather large face. The eyes were light blue in colour and surrounded by minute puckers and wrinkles. The nose was aquiline, the mouth clean-cut and rather full. The man was dressed in a dark blue overcoat, and the collar and cuffs of the coat were heavily trimmed with astrachan fur. The room was absolutely still. Something like a grey mist or curtain descended over Megbie's eyes. It rolled up, like a curtain, and Megbie saw the man with absolute clearness and certainty. He could almost have put out his hand and touched him. Measured by the mere material standard of time, these events did not take more than a second, perhaps only a part of a second. Then the writer became aware that the room was filled with sound--sudden, loud and menacing. It was a sound as of sudden drums at midnight, such a sound as the gay dances in Brussels heard on the eve of Waterloo, when the Assembly sounded in the great square, and the whole city awoke. In another moment, Megbie knew what the sound in his ears really was. His own heart and pulses were racing and beating like the sudden _traillerie_ of drums. In a flash he recognized the face and form of his visitor--this outward form and semblance of a man which had sprung up and grown concrete in the night! The phantom--if indeed it was a phantom--wore the dress and aspect of Eustace Charliewood, the well-known man about town who had killed himself at Brighton a few years ago! Megbie had never spoken to Charliewood--so far as he could remember--but he knew him perfectly well by sight, as every one in the West End of London had known him, and he was a member of one of the clubs to which the dead man had belonged. The Thing that stood there, the Thing or Person which had sprung out of the air, wore the earthly semblance of Eustace Charliewood. Megbie shouted out loud. A great cry burst from his lips, a cry of surprise and fear, a challenge of that almost dreadful _curiosity_ that men experience now and then when they are in the presence of the inexplicable, the terrible and the unknown. Then Megbie saw that the face of the Apparition was horribly contorted.