The lips had fallen inanely apart with an absurd look of silly wonder.
The eyes were wide open and stared directly ahead with the most unnatural expression or lack of it that Robert had ever beheld in the visage of mortal man.
Even the detective, accustomed as he was to all sorts of uncommon spectacles, could not repress a slight disposition to shudder.
One bony hand grasped the candlestick, and the other held some sort of round object, to which Robert directed his attention.
By the sudden motion he made the detective knew that the young man had discovered what this object was, and pressed his arm warningly.
It was one of the canvas bags from the recess in the wall.
Just before the opening of the bin his uncle paused, like a speculative phantom, as if to consider its next doleful move.
His entire countenance, upon nearer view, like the canvas which the painter has roughly outlined, was suggestive of anything, according to the fancy of the beholder.
Upon this spiritless blank Robert depicted, with a morbid genius and the stimulation of his unnatural surroundings, all that was reminiscent of his uncle’s littleness.
But this uneasy transit from the room upstairs to the bin below, the vacant, irresponsible ensemble, the inscrutable determination to fulfill some strange obligation, enforced by what influence or moral unrest he could not tell, culminated in the mind of the young man in the only possible explanation: