please, to Mr. Critchett's, and be sure to wait for an answer.
Then come back direct to me, up here. I don't think, Ada, your
mistress believes much in Critchett; but I have fully explained
what I want. He has made me up many prescriptions. Explain that
to his assistant if he is not there. Go at once, and you will be
back before she is. I should be so very much obliged, tell him.
"Mr Arthur Lawford."'

The minutes slowly drifted by. He sat quite still in the clear
untroubled light, waiting in the silence of the empty house. And
for the first time he was confronted with the cold incredible
horror of his ordeal. Who would believe, who could believe, that
behind this strange and awful, yet how simple mask, lay himself?
What test; what heaped-up evidence of identity would break it
down? It was all a loathsome ignominy. It was utterly absurd. It
was--

Suddenly, with a kind of ape-like cunning, he deliberately raised
a long lean forefinger and pointed it at the shadowy crystal of
the looking-glass. Perhaps he was dead, was really and indeed
changed in body, was fated really and indeed to change in soul,
into That. 'It's that beastly voice again,' Lawford cried out
loud, looking vacantly at his upstretched finger. And then, hand
and arm, not too willingly, as it were, obeyed; relaxed and fell
to his side. 'You must keep a tight hold, old man,' he muttered
to himself. 'Once, once you lose yourself--the least symptom of
that--the least symptom, and it's all up!' And the fools, the
heartless, preposterous fools had brought him one volume!

When on earth was Ada coming back? She was lagging on purpose.