oned up his coat and went away,
leaving me to my reflections by the library fire.

If Carvel had intended to have a family party in his house at Christmas,
including his nephew whom he had never seen, and whose mother had been
mad, and the great scientist who had attended her, it seemed strange
that he should have asked me as directly as he had done to spend the
whole winter under his roof. I had never been asked for so long a visit
before, and had never been treated with such confidence and received so
intimately as I now was. I could not help wondering whether I was to be
told the reason of what was going on, whether, indeed, anything was
going on at all, and whether the air of depression and mystery which I
thought I observed were not the result of my own imagination, rather
than of any actual foundation in fact. The professor might be making a
visit for his pleasure, but I knew how valuable his time must be, and I
wondered how he could afford to spend it in mere amusement. I
remembered John Carvel's hesitation as we drove to the station that
morning, and his evident annoyance when I proposed to leave. He knew me
well enough to say, "All right, if you don't mind, run up to town for a
day or two," but he had not said it. He had manifested the strongest
desire that I should stay, and I had determined to comply with his
request. At the same time I was left entirely in the dark as to what was
going on in the family, and whispered words, conversations that ceased
abruptly on my approach, and many other little signs told me beyond all
doubt that something was occurring of which I had no knowledge. Without
being inquisitive, it is hard to live in such surroundings without
having one's curiosity roused, and the circumstance of my former meeting
with the professor, now so suddenly illuminated by the discovery that
the lady whose life he had saved was the sister-in-law of our host, led
me to believe, almost intuitively, that the mystery, if mystery there
were, was connected in some way with Madame Patoff. As I thought of her,
the memory of the little inn, the Gasthof zum Goldenen Anker, in
Weissenstein, came vividly back to me. The splash of the plunging Nagold
was in my ears, the smell of the boundless pine forest was in my
nostrils; once more I seemed to be looking down from the upper window of
the hostelry upon the deep ravine, a sheer precipice from the back of
the house, broken only by some few struggling trees that appear