“So that I couldn’t see them here. But every way I turn they are looking straight at me. Sometimes they almost blaze when I try to look away.”
There was but one chance for him now: he must have some diversion. I forgot that I had come to stay this time.
“Say, Thornt,” I suggested, “come with me for a few weeks hunting in the mountains. It’s been two years since you and I were together on a trip.”
He sat for a moment in deep thought, his face twitching convulsively, his eyes staring into vacancy.
“I am going to get out of this town,” he finally asserted.
I reached my hand across the table to him. He hesitated as though he didn’t understand, but finally took it with the same grasp he had given me on the street when he recognized my sympathy for him, and with the same pathetic appeal in his eye, gripped it until I winced.
While I still pondered over the situation he straightened up resolutely, as though he had finally reached a determination. With a desperate effort to control the emotion that now convulsed his whole being, he addressed me in a dry, husky voice:
“Frank, excuse me for a moment; and as we have always been friends, don’t think hard of me tonight.”
I nodded an assent and he walked slowly to a door at the far side of the room, passed through and closed it.
As soon as I found myself alone, the grim horror of my surroundings attacked me with reinforced fury. The dread of my wretched host’s insanity became more intense with him in the next room on a mysterious mission, at which he had asked me not to be offended. Not even the slightest sound proceeded now from the room he had entered. The changeless monotony of the omnipresent green was enhanced by the oppressive silence that reigned throughout the house, save for the intolerable tick of the old clock that stood on the floor in the corner, and seemed to pause indefinitely after each stroke, measuring eternity instead of time.