all descriptions, and sometimes galvanised into active life again by the
will of a trained manipulator, a mind versed in the practices of lower
magic. That this woman understood its vile commerce, I am persuaded,
and the forces she set going during her life have simply been
accumulating ever since, and would have continued to do so had they not
been drawn down upon yourself, and afterwards discharged and satisfied
through me.

"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."

Dr. Silence then produced from his pocket-book an old-fashioned woodcut
of the same person which his secretary had unearthed from the records of
the Newgate Calendar. The woodcut and the pencil drawing were two
different aspects of the same dreadful visage. The men compared them for
some moments in silence.