The thin, distant voice was insistent.
“I shall not be here in the morning; you must come to-night.”
This repeated answer seemed final and decisive. In the course of an ordinary affair Arnbush would have ordered the speaker to remain and await his arrival in the morning. But the voice seemed one not easily to be ordered. And Arnbush was still hot with the moving impulses of his affair. There was no mood for sleep on him, although the night was advanced. And he determined to go. He got his coat and hat and descended into the street.
A few minutes brought him to the number.
The building, gaunt with its lightless windows, was abandoned. But the door to the dark entrance opened as he approached.
“We shall have to walk up,” a voice said. “It is not far.”
Arnbush could not see the man; but he recognized the voice, and he went in. It seemed a long journey up the stairs. Finally they came into a room lighted dimly, above a table, with a gas jet.
The room was fitted with all the devices of a chemist’s trade; there was the faint, pungent odor of such a place about it. Two tall windows looked out above the city, and there was a chair and a stool beside the table.
The chemist was now visible to Arnbush: a tall, stooped figure in a sort of smock; a big, nearly naked head, bulging above the brows and fringed with straw-colored hair; a pasty face, livid and unhealthy; and thick, myopic glasses that reduced the eyes behind them.
The chemist took the stool behind the table and indicated the chair before it for his guest.