No one met Parker Steel at Roxton station that June evening. A porter piled his luggage on a cab, for the physician’s own carriage was not forthcoming. A sense of isolation and neglect took hold upon him as he drove through the sleepy streets of the old town. Loneliness is never comforting to a man who is cursed with an irrepressible conscience, and his own restless imaginings rose like a cold fog into the June air. Parker Steel shivered as he had often shivered when driving through moonlit mists to answer a midnight message. The very elms about St. Antonia’s spire had a shadowy strangeness for him, a gloom that gave nothing of the glow of a return home.
Parker Steel stood in his own dining-room, waiting and listening, as though he were in a stranger’s house. Symons, the starched servant, had opened the door to him without a smile; his luggage had been carried up-stairs. He had heard voices, faint, distant voices, that had tantalized him with words that he could not understand. He had been ready to ask the woman Symons a dozen questions, but had faltered from a self-conscious fear of betraying his own thoughts. The house seemed full of some indefinable dread as the dusk deepened towards night.
A door opened above. He heard footsteps descending the stairs, so slowly in the silence of the darkening house, that the sound reminded the man of the slow drip of water into a well. Parker Steel found himself counting them as they descended towards the hall. If it was Betty, how was he to construe the message of the morning? The suffering of suspense drove him to action. He turned sharply, crossed the room, and, opening the door, looked out into the hall.
“Hallo, dear, is it you?”
She was in white, and her foot was on the last step of the stairs.
“I am glad that you have come, Parker.”
“I had your wire early. I imagined—”
“That I was ill?”
“Yes, that you were ill.”
She halted with one hand on the carved foot-post of the balustrading. The dusk of the hall showed nothing but a white figure and a gray oval to mark her face. Some mysterious psychic force seemed to hold husband and wife apart. Their two personalities had become incompatible through some subtle ferment of distrust.