As I stood there I was a good deal more disturbed by the discovery of the gap in my memory than by the fact of being alone in a pitch-dark house, either empty or else inhabited by strangers. Once before of late I had noted this queer temporary blotting-out of some well-known fact; and here was a second instance of it. Decidedly, I wasn’t as well over my illness as the doctors had told me.... Well, I would get back to Morgat and lie up there for a day or two, doing nothing, just eating and sleeping....
In my self-absorption I had lost my bearings, and no longer remembered where the door was. I felt in every pocket in turn for a match—but since the doctors had made me give up smoking, why should I have found one?
The failure to find a match increased my sense of irritated helplessness, and I was groping clumsily about the hall among the angles of unseen furniture when a light slanted along the rough-cast wall of the stairs. I followed its direction, and on the landing above me I saw a figure in white shading a candle with one hand and looking down. A chill ran along my spine, for the figure bore a strange resemblance to that of Mary Pask as I used to know her.
“Oh, it’s you!” she exclaimed in the cracked twittering voice which was at one moment like an old woman’s quaver, at another like a boy’s falsetto. She came shuffling down in her baggy white garments, with her usual clumsy swaying movements; but I noticed that her steps on the wooden stairs were soundless. Well—they would be, naturally!
I stood without a word, gazing up at the strange vision above me, and saying to myself: “There’s nothing there, nothing whatever. It’s your digestion, or your eyes, or some damned thing wrong with you somewhere—”
But there was the candle, at any rate; and as it drew nearer, and lit up the place about me, I turned and caught hold of the doorlatch. For, remember, I had seen the cable, and Grace in crape....
“Why, what’s the matter? I assure you, you don’t disturb me!” the white figure twittered; adding, with a faint laugh: “I don’t have so many visitors nowadays—”
She had reached the hall, and stood before me, lifting her candle shakily and peering up into my face. “You haven’t changed—not as much as I should have thought. But I have, haven’t I?” she appealed to me with another laugh; and abruptly she laid her hand on my arm. I looked down at the hand, and thought to myself: “That can’t deceive me.”
I have always been a noticer of hands. The key to character that other people seek in the eyes, the mouth, the modelling of the skull, I find in the curve of the nails, the cut of the finger-tips, the way the palm, rosy or sallow, smooth or seamed, swells up from its base. I remembered Mary Pask’s hand vividly because it was so like a caricature of herself; round, puffy, pink, yet prematurely old and useless. And there, unmistakably, it lay on my sleeve: but changed and shrivelled—somehow like one of those pale freckled toadstools that the least touch resolves to dust.... Well—to dust? Of course....
I looked at the soft wrinkled fingers, with their foolish little oval finger-tips that used to be so innocently and naturally pink, and now were blue under the yellowing nails—and my flesh rose in ridges of fear.