Four Weird Tales | Page 6

about it, for he experienced a sudden sinking of the heart, accompanied by a sense of
foreboding anticipation, and felt that beneath his exhaustion there lay a centre of
tremendous excitement. The emotion caused by the engagement was at work, and would
presently cause the actual details of the appointment to reappear.
Inside the restaurant the feeling increased, instead of passing: some one was waiting for
him somewhere--some one whom he had definitely arranged to meet. He was expected
by a person that very night and just about that very time. But by whom? Where? A
curious inner trembling came over him, and he made a strong effort to hold himself in

hand and to be ready for anything that might come.
And then suddenly came the knowledge that the place of appointment was this very
restaurant, and, further, that the person he had promised to meet was already here,
waiting somewhere quite close beside him.
He looked up nervously and began to examine the faces round him. The majority of the
diners were Frenchmen, chattering loudly with much gesticulation and laughter; and there
was a fair sprinkling of clerks like himself who came because the prices were low and the
food good, but there was no single face that he recognised until his glance fell upon the
occupant of the corner seat opposite, generally filled by himself.
"There's the man who's waiting for me!" thought Jones instantly.
He knew it at once. The man, he saw, was sitting well back into the corner, with a thick
overcoat buttoned tightly up to the chin. His skin was very white, and a heavy black
beard grew far up over his cheeks. At first the secretary took him for a stranger, but when
he looked up and their eyes met, a sense of familiarity flashed across him, and for a
second or two Jones imagined he was staring at a man he had known years before. For,
barring the beard, it was the face of an elderly clerk who had occupied the next desk to
his own when he first entered the service of the insurance company, and had shown him
the most painstaking kindness and sympathy in the early difficulties of his work. But a
moment later the illusion passed, for he remembered that Thorpe had been dead at least
five years. The similarity of the eyes was obviously a mere suggestive trick of memory.
The two men stared at one another for several seconds, and then Jones began to act
instinctively, and because he had to. He crossed over and took the vacant seat at the
other's table, facing him; for he felt it was somehow imperative to explain why he was
late, and how it was he had almost forgotten the engagement altogether.
No honest excuse, however, came to his assistance, though his mind had begun to work
furiously.
"Yes, you are late," said the man quietly, before he could find a single word to utter. "But
it doesn't matter. Also, you had forgotten the appointment, but that makes no difference
either."
"I knew--that there was an engagement," Jones stammered, passing his hand over his
forehead; "but somehow--"
"You will recall it presently," continued the other in a gentle voice, and smiling a little.
"It was in deep sleep last night we arranged this, and the unpleasant occurrences of to-day
have for the moment obliterated it."
A faint memory stirred within him as the man spoke, and a grove of trees with moving
forms hovered before his eyes and then vanished again, while for an instant the stranger
seemed to be capable of self-distortion and to have assumed vast proportions, with
wonderful flaming eyes.

"Oh!" he gasped. "It was there--in the other region?"
"Of course," said the other, with a smile that illumined his whole face. "You will
remember presently, all in good time, and meanwhile you have no cause to feel afraid."
There was a wonderful soothing quality in the man's voice, like the whispering of a great
wind, and the clerk felt calmer at once. They sat a little while longer, but he could not
remember that they talked much or ate anything. He only recalled afterwards that the
head waiter came up and whispered something in his ear, and that he glanced round and
saw the other people were looking at him curiously, some of them laughing, and that his
companion then got up and led the way out of the restaurant.
They walked hurriedly through the streets, neither of them speaking; and Jones was so
intent upon getting back the whole history of the affair from the region of deep sleep, that
he barely noticed the way they took. Yet it was clear he knew where they were bound for
just as well as his companion, for