He stopped me with a peremptory gesture.

"Ridel," he began, "I am in no mood for jesting, and so I beg you not
to jest."

He certainly was in no mood for jesting. His face was changed. It
looked paler, longer and more expressive. His strange, "different"
eyes kept shifting from one object to another.

"I never thought," he began again, "that I should reveal to
another ... another man what you are about to hear and what ought
to have died ... yes, died, hidden in my breast; but it seems it is
to be--and indeed I have no choice. It is destiny! Listen."

And he told me a long story.

I have mentioned already that he was a poor hand at telling stories,
but it was not only his lack of skill in describing events that had
happened to him that impressed me that night; the very sound of his
voice, his glances, the movements which he made with his fingers and
his hands--everything about him, indeed, seemed unnatural,
unnecessary, false, in fact. I was very young and inexperienced in
those days and did not know that the habit of high-flown language and
falsity of intonation and manner may become so ingrained in a man that
he is incapable of shaking it off: it is a sort of curse. Later in
life I came across a lady who described to me the effect on her of her
son's death, of her "boundless" grief, of her fears for her reason, in
such exaggerated language, with such theatrical gestures, such
melodramatic movements of her head and rolling of her eyes, that I