“Moreau!” said I. “I know that name.”

“The devil you do!” said he. “What an ass I was to mention it to you! I might have thought. Anyhow, it will give you an inkling of our — mysteries. Whiskey?”

“No, thanks; I’m an abstainer.”

“I wish I’d been. But it’s no use locking the door after the steed is stolen. It was that infernal stuff which led to my coming here, — that, and a foggy night. I thought myself in luck at the time, when Moreau offered to get me off. It’s queer — ”

“Montgomery,” said I, suddenly, as the outer door closed, “why has your man pointed ears?”

“Damn!” he said, over his first mouthful of food. He stared at me for a moment, and then repeated, “Pointed ears?”

“Little points to them,” said I, as calmly as possible, with a catch in my breath; “and a fine black fur at the edges?”

He helped himself to whiskey and water with great deliberation. “I was under the impression — that his hair covered his ears.”

“I saw them as he stooped by me to put that coffee you sent to me on the table. And his eyes shine in the dark.”

By this time Montgomery had recovered from the surprise of my question. “I always thought,” he said deliberately, with with a certain accentuation of his flavouring of lisp, “that there was something the matter with his ears, from the way he covered them. What were they like?”

I was persuaded from his manner that this ignorance was a pretence. Still, I could hardly tell the man that I thought him a liar. “Pointed,” I said; “rather small and furry, — distinctly furry. But the whole man is one of the strangest beings I ever set eyes on.”

A sharp, hoarse cry of animal pain came from the enclosure behind us. Its depth and volume testified to the puma. I saw Montgomery wince.

“Yes?” he said.

“Where did you pick up the creature?”

“San Francisco. He’s an ugly brute, I admit. Half-witted, you know. Can’t remember where he came from. But I’m used to him, you know. We both are. How does he strike you?”

“He’s unnatural,” I said. “There’s something about him — don’t think me fanciful, but it gives me a nasty little sensation, a tightening of my muscles, when he comes near me. It’s a touch — of the diabolical, in fact.”

Montgomery had stopped eating while I told him this. “Rum!” he said. “I can’t see it.” He resumed his meal. “I had no idea of it,” he said, and masticated. “The crew of the schooner must have felt it the same. Made a dead set at the poor devil. You saw the captain?”

Suddenly the puma howled again, this time more painfully. Montgomery swore under his breath. I had half a mind to attack him about the men on the beach. Then the poor brute within gave vent to a series of short, sharp cries.

Twelve o’clock had scarce rung out over London, ere the knocker sounded very gently on the door. I went myself at the summons, and found a small man crouching against the pillars of the portico.

“Are you come from Dr. Jekyll?” I asked.

He told me “yes” by a constrained gesture; and when I had bidden him enter, he did not obey me without a searching backward glance into the darkness of the square. There was a policeman not far off, advancing with his bull’s eye open; and at the sight, I thought my visitor started and made greater haste.

These particulars struck me, I confess, disagreeably; and as I followed him into the bright light of the consulting-room, I kept my hand ready on my weapon. Here, at last, I had a chance of clearly seeing him. I had never set eyes on him before, so much was certain. He was small, as I have said; I was struck besides with the shocking expression of his face, with his remarkable combination of great muscular activity and great apparent debility of constitution, and — last but not least — with the odd, subjective disturbance caused by his neighbourhood. This bore some resemblance to incipient rigour, and was accompanied by a marked sinking of the pulse. At the time, I set it down to some idiosyncratic, personal distaste, and merely wondered at the acuteness of the symptoms; but I have since had reason to believe the cause to lie much deeper in the nature of man, and to turn on some nobler hinge than the principle of hatred.

This person (who had thus, from the first moment of his entrance, struck in me what I can only describe as a disgustful curiosity) was dressed in a fashion that would have made an ordinary person laughable; his clothes, that is to say, although they were of rich and sober fabric, were enormously too large for him in every measurement — the trousers hanging on his legs and rolled up to keep them from the ground, the waist of the coat below his haunches, and the collar sprawling wide upon his shoulders. Strange to relate, this ludicrous accoutrement was far from moving me to laughter. Rather, as there was something abnormal and misbegotten in the very essence of the creature that now faced me — something seizing, surprising, and revolting — this fresh disparity seemed but to fit in with and to reinforce it; so that to my interest in the man’s nature and character, there was added a curiosity as to his origin, his life, his fortune and status in the world.

These observations, though they have taken so great a space to be set down in, were yet the work of a few seconds. My visitor was, indeed, on fire with sombre excitement.

“Have you got it?” he cried. “Have you got it?” And so lively was his impatience that he even laid his hand upon my arm and sought to shake me.

I put him back, conscious at his touch of a certain icy pang along my blood. “Come, sir,” said I. “You forget that I have not yet the pleasure of your acquaintance. Be seated, if you please.” And I showed him an example, and sat down myself in my customary seat and with as fair an imitation of my ordinary manner to a patient, as the lateness of the hour, the nature of my pre-occupations, and the horror I had of my visitor, would suffer me to muster.