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.

There was nothing particularly alarming in all that, and yet there was
that in the room which once more seized the man at his heart and held
him there, rigid again, terrified, and, above all, inexpressibly awed.
(At least, that is how I should interpret his description.) He said that
it wasn't like the spare bedroom at all, as he ordinarily knew it (and,
indeed, it was a mean sort of room when I saw it, without a fireplace,
though of tolerable size). It was like another room altogether, said
Thomas.

He tried to listen to what Frank was saying, and I imagine he