"I went across the room and examined myself in the glass. The skin was
very pale, and the eyes dull. My temperature, I found, was a little
below normal and my pulse faint and irregular. But these smaller signs
of disturbance were as nothing compared with the feeling I had--though
no outward signs bore testimony to the fact--that I had narrowly escaped
a real and ghastly catastrophe. I felt shaken, somehow, shaken to the
very roots of my being."
The doctor rose from his chair and crossed over to the dying fire, so
that no one could see the expression on his face as he stood with his
back to the grate, and continued his weird tale.
"It would be wearisome," he went on in a lower voice, looking over our
heads as though he still saw the dingy top floor of that haunted
Edinburgh lodging-house; "it would be tedious for me at this length of
time to analyse my feelings, or attempt to reproduce for you the
thorough examination to which I endeavoured then to subject my whole
being, intellectual, emotional, and physical. I need only mention the
dominant emotion with which this curious episode left me--the indignant
anger against myself that I could ever have lost my self-control enough
to come under the sway of so gross and absurd a delusion.
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