As he thought the matter over, comfortably lounging back in a big arm-chair up in his rooms, he tried to force himself to the pacifying conclusion that the whole affair was fortuitous. He would keep a weather-eye open for such casual occurrences, in the future; but he now had no time to bother with the drifting shadows of uncertainty. He had already that day faced more material dangers; there were more substantial perils, he knew, rising up about him.
He flung himself back, with a sigh, after looking at his watch, and through the upward-threading drifts of his cigar smoke he wondered, half-reprovingly, what was taking place in the house not two hundred yards away from him, where Frances was so wakefully watching and working, while he sat there, idly waiting—since waiting, for once, was to be part of the game.
He afterward decided that in his sheer weariness of body and mind he must have dozed off into a light sleep.
It was past midnight when he awoke with a start, a vague sense of impending evil heavy upon him.
His first thought, on awakening, was that some one had knocked. He glanced at his watch, as he sprang to open the door. It was on the point of one.
Frank should have been back an hour ago. Then he had fallen asleep, of a certainty, he decided, with electric rapidity of thought.
But this was she, come at last, he conjectured. Yet, with that sense of impending danger still over him, he stepped back and turned off the lights. Then he quietly and cautiously opened the door.
No one was there. He peered quickly down through the gloom of the hallways, but still neither sound nor movement greeted him.
His now distraught mind quickly ran the gamut of possibilities. A baffling, indeterminate impression seized him that somebody, somewhere, was reaching out to him through the midnight silence, trying to come in touch with him and speak to him.
He looked at the motionless clapper of his transmitter signal-bell, where he had discreetly muffled the little gong with a linen handkerchief. It could not have been the telephone.