* * * * *

Thomas had seldom seen his master so perturbed over a human being before.  He wondered what on earth was the matter.  During the few minutes that he was in the room he looked at the patient curiously, and he noticed that the doctor was continually looking at him too.  Thomas described to me Frank’s appearance.  He was very much flushed, he said, with very bright eyes, and he was talking incessantly.  And it was evidently this delirious talking that had upset the doctor.  I tried to get out of Doctor Whitty what it was that Frank had actually said, but the doctor shut up his face tight and would say nothing.  Thomas was more communicative, though far from adequate.

It was about religion, he said, that Frank was talking—­about religion....  And that was really about all that he could say of that incident.

Thomas awoke about one o’clock that night, and, still with the uneasiness that he had had earlier in the evening, climbed out of bed without disturbing his wife, put on his slippers and great-coat and made his way down the attic stairs.  The October moon was up, and, shining through the staircase window, showed him the door of the spare bedroom with a line of light beneath it.  From beyond that door came the steady murmur of a voice....

Now Thomas’s nerves were strong:  he was a little lean kind of man, very wiry and active, nearly fifty years old, and he had lived with his master, and the mice and the snakes, and disagreeable objects in bottles, for more than sixteen years.  He had been a male nurse in an asylum before that.  Yet there was something—­he told me later—­that gripped him suddenly as he was half-way down the stairs and held him in a kind of agony which he could in no way describe.  It was connected with the room behind that lighted door.  It was not that he feared for his master, nor for Frank.  It was something else altogether. (What a pity it is that our system of education teaches neither self-analysis nor the art of narration!)

He stood there—­he told me—­he should think for the better part of ten minutes, unable to move either way, listening, always listening, to the voice that rose and sank and lapsed now and then into silences that were worse than all, and telling himself vigorously that he was not at all frightened.

It was a creak somewhere in the old house that disturbed him and snapped the thin, rigid little thread that seemed to paralyze his soul; and still in a sort of terror, though no longer in the same stiff agony, he made his way down the three or four further steps of the flight, laid hold of the handle, turned it and peered in.

Frank was lying quiet so far as he could see.  A night-light burned by the bottles and syringes on the table at the foot of the bed, and, although shaded from the young man’s face, still diffused enough light to shoes the servant the figure lying there, and his master, seated beyond the bed, very close to it, still in his day-clothes—­still, even, in his velvet cap—­his chin propped in his hand, staring down at his patient, utterly absorbed and attentive.