table. Now the room was so pitch dark that Wogan could do no more than
guess at the position even of the window. The table, he remembered, was
not far from the door, and the door was at some distance from his bed,
and in the wall on his right. He moved forward in the darkness with his
hands in front of him, groping for the table. The room was large; in a
little his hands touched something, and that something was a pillar of
the bed. He had missed his way in his bedroom. Wogan laughed to himself
and started off again; and the next thing which his outstretched hands
touched was a doorknob. The table should now be a little way to his
left. He was just turning away in that direction, when it occurred to
him that he ought to have felt the rim of the top bar of his tilted
chair underneath the door-handle. He stooped down and felt for the
chair; there was no chair, and he stood very still.

The fears bred of imagination had now left him; he was restored by the
shock of an actual danger. He leaned forward quietly and felt if the key
was still in the lock. But there was no lock to this door. Wogan felt
the surface of the door; it was of paper. It was plainly the door of a
cupboard in the wall, papered after the same pattern as the wall, which
by the flickering light of his single candle he had overlooked.

He opened the door and stretched out his arms into the cupboard. He
touched something that moved beneath his hand, a stiff, short crop of
hair, the hair of a man's head. He drew his arm away as though an adder
had stung it; he did not utter a cry or make a movement. He stood for a
moment paralysed, and during that moment a strong hand caught him by the
throat.

Wogan was borne backwards, his assailant sprang at him from the
cupboard, he staggered under the unexpected vigour of the attack, he