“Anything might have brought down the attack, for, besides drugs, there are certain violent emotions, certain moods of the soul, certain spiritual fevers, if I may so call them, which directly open the inner being to a cognisance of this astral region I have mentioned. In your case it happened to be a peculiarly potent drug that did it.

“But now, tell me,” he added, after a pause, handing to the perplexed author a pencil drawing he had made of the dark countenance that had appeared to him during the night on Putney Hill⁠—“tell me if you recognise this face?”

Pender looked at the drawing closely, greatly astonished. He shuddered a little as he looked.

“Undoubtedly,” he said, “it is the face I kept trying to draw⁠—dark, with the great mouth and jaw, and the drooping eye. That is the woman.”