He had reached the limit of his endurance. He pressed his hands over his eyes; and then, as he looked up, he saw a white world and a leaden sky. The horrible illusion was complete; his fate had overtaken him again, and he could not resist it. Trembling from head to foot, stricken with an overwhelming horror and dismay, he turned and made his way through the drifted snow to the old house, climbed the short flight of front steps, and knocked at the office door.
The doctor himself appeared in answer to the summons.
“Is that you, Faunce?” he asked, holding open the door. “I expected you—come in.”
But the words fell on deaf ears. Faunce did not apparently heed them as he entered, still dazed by the long struggle with the storm, and his tall figure whitened with snow. He suffered himself to be stripped of his greatcoat and ordered to a seat by the fire.
The warmth of the room, the glow of the lamplight, the familiar aspect of the place, lined as it was with the doctor’s books and medicine cabinets, the slight aromatic odor of drugs that pervaded it, awoke him from his stupor. He leaned forward, and, stretching his hands out to the blaze, stared steadily into it.
The doctor, who had been watching him from the first, poured some cognac into a glass and brought it.
“You’d better drink that,” he advised gruffly. “Been trying to kill yourself?”
Faunce took the glass, drained it, and set it down on the table.
“No,” he replied in a low voice. “I don’t want to die. There’s nothing I dread more than death. I’ve always had a kind of physical abhorrence of it.”
His host quietly resumed his own seat on the opposite side of the fire.