I am a delicately constituted individual, and I preferred smoking my cigarette all alone in a corner of the big hall, to consuming my usual allowance of tea and buttered toast in the society of the glass-eyed person in the smoking-room. I considered that I was doing a little intellectual fast all by myself.
I saw nothing more of my friend of the false brown optic that evening, except that I observed his bloodshot eye of the flesh fixed scathingly upon me from a remote corner of the great dining-room, where he appeared to be dining mostly off a large bottle of champagne.
I sauntered away my evening as I had done the others of my first week's "cure" in Bath, making a fair division of it between the dining-room, the smoking-room and the reading-room. I did not go near the drawing-room; its occupants consisted solely of a few obese ladies of the type referred to by the gentleman with the glass eye, wearing such palpable wigs that my artistic susceptibilities were sorely wounded at the mere sight of them, and my sense of decency outraged.
I went to bed in my great room over-looking the river and the weir, and I lay awake listening to its rushing waters, for the night was warm and almost summer-like, as it happens sometimes in a fine November, and my windows were open.
I suppose I fell asleep, for when I was again conscious, the Abbey clock struck four; at the same moment I became aware that some one was in my room. I could discern the figure of a man in the shadow of the wardrobe near the chair on which I had placed my clothes when I took them off. I leant over the side of the bed and switched on the electric light; the figure turned. It was the dark man with the glass eye!
"What the devil are you doing in my room?" I asked in none too polite a tone.
He was not at all disconcerted, but stood looking at me, replacing his pince-nez.
"Well, really," he replied, "wonders will never cease. I thought I was in my own room!"
I knew he was lying.
"I fail to perceive," I said, sitting up in bed, "in what manner you could have mistaken this room for your own. In the first place the door is locked."