In the verandah I found Dr Wayne smoking a pipe and enjoying the rare sunshine of this fleeting St Luke's Summer. We smiled at one another as I passed within, but I did not pause to converse, for I was impatient to open my concealed parcel. So I went upstairs and seated myself on a chair in the full light shed from the open window. Having unwound some folds of cloth I extricated the mirror of which Fajal had spoken, and found it to be a moderate-sized rectangular piece of thick glass without any frame and offering no peculiarity of aspect. Taking it in both my hands and in full glare of the sunlit window, I set to gaze intently in the expectation of some development whose nature I already half divined. As I prepared for this careful inspection of myself, or rather my counterfeit, I recalled to mind a picture I had seen years ago in the Wiertz Museum in what was then the capital of the Belgian kingdom, representing a youthful courtesan of the Mid-Victorian era stripped bare to the waist and contemplating herself in a cheval-glass. But in the painter's canvas the glass itself returned no true image of her comely complacent face and her swelling breasts, but in their stead a leering female skeleton, a revelation that seemed in no wise to shake the lady's composure. So in my own case I had a shrewd premonition I was destined to receive some shock of this nature out of the innocent-looking mirror lately presented to me. Of this shadowy encounter before me however I experienced no dread; very possibly the glass would reveal to me my own anatomy as a suitable _memento mori_ to dissipate any lingering notions I might still entertain as to the undesirability of prolonging my life by a refusal to return to Meleager. But why, I asked myself, should I be afraid to survey my own basic framework? Are we not all mere skeletons clothed in an exiguous garment of skin and tissue, and animated by some mysterious internal engine which keeps intact the fleshy envelope and supplies the motive power of mind and muscle?