THE PLOT The sequel to the events of this evening may be told very briefly and of it the reader can form his own judgment.

I narrate it as it happened.
That night I did not sleep at all well.

It may have been because of the excitement of the great shoot in which I found myself in competition with another man whom I disliked and who had defrauded me in the past, to say nothing of its physical strain in cold and heavy weather.

Or it may have been that my imagination was stirred by the arrival of that strange pair, Harut and Marut, apparently in search of myself, seven thousand miles away from any place where they can have known aught of an insignificant individual with a purely local repute.

Or it may have been that the pictures which they showed me when under the influence of the fumes of their "tobacco"-- or of their hypnotism--took an undue possession of my brain.
Or lastly, the strange coincidence that the beautiful betrothed of my host should have related to me a tale of her childhood of which she declared she had never spoken before, and that within an hour the two principal actors in that tale should have appeared before my eyes and hers (for I may state that from the beginning I had no doubt that they were the same men), moved me and filled me with quite natural foreboding.