JAMES seemed pleased to see me, but he noticed that in my anxiety and preoccupation I had forgotten to have my hat ironed. The hotel is quite full, and I am to sleep in the Haunted Room to-night.
I am not a hysterical man, and this is not a neurotic story. It is, as a matter of fact, the same old rot to which the shilling shockers have made us accustomed. I cannot account in any way for my experiences last night in the Haunted Room, but they certainly were not due to nervousness. I had not been asleep long before I had a most curious and vivid dream. I felt that I was not in the hotel, and that at the same time I was not out of it. I had a curious sense of being everywhere in general, and nowhere in particular.
I saw before me a gorgeously furnished room. On the tiger-skin rug before the fire was a basket with a crewel-worked chair-back spread over it. _What was in the basket?_ Again and again I asked myself that question. I felt like a long-division sum, and a cold shiver went down my quotient.
In one corner of the room stood a man of about thirty, with a handsome, wicked face. One hand rested on the drawer of a writing-table. Slowly he drew from it a folded paper, and read, in a harsh, raucous voice:--
"'To cleaning and repairing one----' No, that's not it."
He selected another paper. Ah, it was the right one this time!
"'Memorandum of Aunt JANE'S Will.' 'All property to go to ALICE SMITH, unless Aunt JANE'S poodle, _Tommy Atkins_, dies before ALICE SMITH comes of age. In which case, it all goes to me.' I remember making that note when the will was read. And now"--he glanced at the covered basket--"_Tommy_'s kicked the bucket. Well, he stood in my way. Who's to know? But there must be no _post-mortem_, no 'vet' fetched in. Happy thought--I'll have the brute stuffed." He knelt down by the side of the basket, and slowly drew back the covering. "Ah!" he said--"it's cruel work."
Did he refer to the chair-back? or did he refer to the way in which, for the sake of gain, an honest dog had been MURDERED? For there before my eyes lay the dead poodle, _Tommy Atkins_!
"ALICE loses all her money," he continued, "but that doesn't matter. She tells me that she's picked up no end of a swell down at Ryde, and he may marry her. The question is--will he?" Once more I felt like a division sum. I yearned to call out loudly, and answer with a decided negative; but no words came. My strength was gone. I was utterly worked out, and there was no remainder.