As if the sound of the name, premature as it was, had put the finishing touch to his reckless cynicism, he hesitated no longer.
With an almost savage gesture he struck a match and lighted a candle on his writing-table; and as the little yellow flame sprang up, and strove, vainly, to enlighten the encompassing gloom, he set about his preparations with a sudden energy in striking contrast with his previous lethargy.
When all was ready there came a last second of hesitation. With the syringe in his hand, his arm bared, he paused, and for a last poignant moment Iris' face rose before him in the flickering light. But now her eyes had no power to move him from his purpose. Rather they maddened him with their steadfast radiance, and with a muttered oath he looked aside from that appealing vision and turned the key, recklessly, in the door which led to the Paradise of Fools.
Nearly an hour later the telephone bell rang, sharply, insistently in the hall. It went on ringing, again and again, a curiously vital sound in the quiet house; but Anstice did not hear it, and at length the ringing ceased.
It was nearly half an hour later when another bell rang, this time the bell of the front door; but again no answer came to the imperative summons. And now the bell rang on, so continuously, so persistently, that at last its sound penetrated the dulled hearing of the man who huddled in a corner of the big couch, mind and body alike dazed and incapable of making any effort to understand the meaning of this oddly insistent noise.
He was only conscious of a desire for it to cease; of a longing, not sufficiently vivid to be acute, but the strongest emotion of which he was at the moment capable, for a return to the silence which had hitherto prevailed; and although the noise disturbed and angered him it never occurred to him that to answer the summons would be the best way of ending the irritating sound.
So that bell too went unanswered; and in due course it also ceased to ring.
But that was not to be the end.
Dimly he heard the sound of voices, of footsteps in the hall, of the striking of a match and the hissing of the gas. Then there was a confused noise which was like and yet unlike a rapping on the panels of the door of the room in which he sat; but he felt no inclination whatever to move or make any response; and even when at length the door itself opened, slowly and tentatively, he merely looked up with languid curiosity to see what these phenomena might imply.