naturally affectionate by disposition, but capable of savagery when provoked by terror. His feet were exceedingly large, and his mind was nearly always occupied by the subject which he professed.
This excellent man, in his ill-fitting evening suit, had just said good-bye after an agonised party, upon Monday, the 2nd of May, at the house of Sir John Perkin, a local merchant of ample but ill-merited fortune.
It was as yet but midnight, the rooms were full, and he hoped to slip out early and almost unobserved.
Professor Higginson sidled aimlessly into the study that was doing duty as a cloakroom, sidled out again on remembering that he had not left his things there, and next turned to gaze almost as aimlessly at a series of pegs on which he hoped to find a familiar slouch hat, rather greasy, and an equally familiar grey Inverness which was like his skin to him. The slouch hat was there. The Inverness was gone.
Was it gone? The Professor of Psychology was a learned man, and his sense of reality was not always exact. Had he come in that Inverness after all? … The more he thought about it the less certain he was. He
