and beginning to trim it.

"How do you mean--'just as you thought'?" I asked, puzzled.

"Gastrell is an impostor, and--and that isn't his wife."

He did not speak again for some moments, being busily occupied in
lighting his long cigar. Presently he leaned back, then blew a great
cloud of smoke towards the ceiling.

Suddenly we heard a click, like the wooden lid of a box suddenly shut.

"Hullo!" he exclaimed suddenly, "what's that?"

"What's what?"

"Why! Look!" he gasped.

His gaze was set upon something in the shadow of a small table in a
corner of the room--something on the floor. In silence, now, we both
stood staring at it, for Osborne had risen suddenly. Slowly it moved. It
was gradually gliding along the floor, with a sound like paper being
pushed along a carpet. Whence it came, where it began and where it
ended, we could not see, for the shadow it was in was very deep. Nor was
its colour in the least discernible.

All we could make out was that some long, sinuous, apparently endless
Thing was passing along the room, close to the wall farthest from us,
coming from under the sofa and disappearing beneath the table.