"Oh, it's you!" Berri exclaimed in a voice that I just recognized as his. "Heavens! but you scared me. I was on my way to your room to borrow your—your—your—to borrow— Oh, Granny!" He broke off with a kind of gulp, and threw his arms around me. "Isn't this ghastly!" Then I knew that he had been told to stay in his room too, and had been suffering the same horrors. Ever since dinner he had been pacing the floor unable, just as I had been, to make up his mind as to the exact significance of the advice to be at home that evening. He could n't help feeling that it might have been a mistake, that something would go wrong; and that again, if nothing did go wrong, there was the hideous conjecture as to what would happen to you to look forward to.
We sat down in my study,—Berri on the edge of a chair, his hands folded with desperate calmness on his lap; I at my desk, where I found, after a minute or two of strained silence, that I had dug a great hole in my blotter and ruined a stylographic pen.
"If they do come," Berri at last whispered, "how do you think we ought to be found? I don't know that it would be altogether the thing to be so—so dressed and apparently waiting." Our extreme preparedness did seem rather assuming, now that he spoke of it; I was far from wanting to appear cock-sure of my election or of anything else to a fiendish mob such as we had watched from my window that night in the autumn.
"And yet," I answered, "if we took off very much, I don't suppose they would wait for us to dress; in fact, I don't think I could dress, and when I came in, it seemed to be getting cool outsi—"
"Ssssshh! I thought I heard something," Berri broke in. He leaned toward the window, and as the lamplight fell on his face, I saw for the first time how pale he was. We listened. The clock ticked with a queer little hum on two notes that I had never known it to make before; the student-lamp grumbled twice, and each time the flame rose and fell; I had never noticed this, either.
"I was perfectly sure," Berri whispered. His whisper was several times louder than his ordinary tone.
"How do you think it would do to take off our coats and neckties?" I suggested. "That would look as if we had begun to get ready for bed without any suspicion of—of—It; and at the same time we would have pretty much everything on."
"You talk now as if you had made up your mind that they were coming," Berri said nervously. "Do you think they are?" The fact of his asking me this dropped me back once more into all the sickening doubt from which for a minute or two I had been unconsciously lifted.
"I don't know," I faltered. "What do you think?" But instead of telling me Berri exclaimed,—
"Oh, this is awful!" and began to walk up and down the room. As he walked he took off his coat and threw it in a corner; then he gave the end of his necktie a jerk that not only undid the knot but ripped his shirt open from his neck to his shoulders, for he had forgotten that on one side the thing was pinned. I don't think he realized what he was doing, as he went on pulling and pulling until he had torn out a narrow strip of linen at least a foot and a half long. Berri, pacing the floor and tearing himself to pieces in a nervous frenzy as he paced, struck me all at once as the funniest thing I had ever seen, and I began, first to giggle, and then to laugh with the kind of laughter that takes possession of you all over and leaves you helpless.