“Most certainly,” was her reply. “Louise, who is married to a solicitor in Scarborough, invited me up to stay a week with her, and I went alone, Dad having gone to London. The house was on the Esplanade, one of the row of big grey houses that face the sea on the South Cliff. The family consisted only of Louise, her husband, three maids, and myself, as visitor. My room was on the second floor, in the front facing the sea, and my experience was almost identical with that of yourself last night. I was awakened just before dawn by feeling a cold touch upon my cheek. And opening my eyes I saw the hand—it seemed to be the horrible hand of Death himself!”
“Most extraordinary!” I ejaculated.
“Since then, Mr Kemball, I have wondered whether; that touch was not sent as warning of impending evil—sent to forewarn me of the sudden death of the man I loved!”
I was silent. The circumstances, so curiously identical, were certainly alarming. Indeed, I could see that the narration of my extraordinary experience had terrified her. She seemed to have become suddenly most solicitous regarding my welfare, for after a slight pause she exclaimed anxiously—
“Do, Mr Kemball, take every precaution to secure your own safety. Somehow I—well, I don’t know how it is, but I feel that the hand is seen as warning—a warning against something which threatens—against some evil of which we have no expectation, or—”
“It warned you of the terrible blow which so soon afterwards fell upon you,” I interrupted. “And it has warned me—of what?”
She shook her head.
“How can we tell?” she asked.
In a flash the remembrance of that bronze cylinder and the dire misfortune which had befallen every one of its possessors occurred to me. I recollected the ancient hieroglyphics upon the scraps of brown crinkled papyri, and their translation. But surely the apparition of the Hand could have no connection with what had been written long ago, before our Christian era?
“Did you actually feel the cold touch of the Hand?” I asked her in eagerness.