So, I took up a lamp and made a thorough search of her spacious apartment. I was not myself in the least afraid of encountering anyone; it was Amelia’s weakness and terror that made me sick at heart. Of course, there was no intruder to be found, nor any sign of one. Again and again, Amelia asked me if I were sure and urged me to look beneath the sofa, behind furniture that couldn’t have concealed a housecat, let alone a grown man. When in the end she became calm, the expression of bitterly melancholy resignation in her face and aspect were worse than the fear that had preceded it; at least her fear had been a kind of animation, compared with this morbid, almost idiotic slackening of her nerves. I sat beside her and plied her with questions, hardly knowing what I was asking half the time, simply to get her to speak and to continue speaking, with the idea that conversation would help her recover herself. A pale gleam had crept into her eyes, and her voice was toneless, often barely above a whisper.

The dream, as near as I could piece it together from her broken answers, involved nothing especially strange, which had been the main problem, the most shocking aspect of the dream. She had simply seen her voyeur there, in her apartment, watching her as usual. She pointed to the corner where he stood, and then to the window he had looked out of. There was a moment when he appeared to be eating something she couldn’t see. Then he had turned and picked up her telephone receiver, exactly as if it had just started ringing, and she heard his voice say:

“This is the residence of the Leuko family.”

For her sake, it was a good thing that her eyes were on her knotted hands when she said this, because it took me a moment to notice and suppress the contortion of shock that these words caused in me. I had, from time to time, referred to my other friends in town, but I had never named them; I had even made a point of withholding the name, prompted by a perverse desire to preserve unblended the two different social worlds to which I had access. But, of course, it wasn’t the surprising introduction of that name between us that shook me, and I was unable to pay any attention to what Amelia was saying for some minutes more. When the occasion presented itself, I asked her around what time she thought she’d had the dream.

“It was about seven when I woke up,” she said. “I wrote to you right away. Where were you?”

“I was at a friend’s house,” I said. “It was his daughter’s birthday today.”