he electric bells haunted his
dreams. Even in his waking hours, he easily took fright, a condition to
which in former times he had been a perfect stranger. If a sleigh with
bells actually did pass the house, he was sometimes so alarmed that he
trembled. That he should hear his own breathing in the silence of his
room did not surprise him; but it perturbed him strangely to listen to
it. Sometimes he had chills. As a physician he kept a clinical
thermometer, and on several occasions ascertained that he had some
temperature. These circumstances disquieted him. He seemed to be living
in an atmosphere producing mild shocks and alarms, which he tried in vain
to dispel. Once, when he was starting off to lunch with Peter Schmidt,
a disinclination to leave his room and lack of appetite kept him back.
Another time it was complete exhaustion that turned him homeward again
when he was half way on the road to Meriden. He could scarcely drag
himself back to the house. His friends never learned anything of these
secret experiences of his. It did not seem odd to them if now and then he
should prefer to remain alone under his own roof.

Over him came creeping a strange life, growing ever stranger. The world,
the sky, the landscape, the country, everything that fell within his
vision, even the human beings he met changed. They moved away. Their
affairs took on a remote, alien character. Indeed, his own affairs
underwent a change. They had been taken from him. Somebody had led them
aside for a time. Later, perhaps, he would find them again, provided the
goal of his altered condition remained the same as his former goal.

At length Peter Schmidt became observant of his friend's retired
existence. When he expressed his solicitude, Frederick repulsed him
somewhat brusquely. Even his friend had grown remote. He betrayed nothing
of that oppressive atmosphere of alarm in which he was enclosed.
Curiously, there was a secret fascination in it, which he was loath to
share with any one and so have it disturbed.

On a starless, pitch-black night, he was sitting, as usual, in his lonely
house at his desk beside his lamp, when it seemed to him that someone was
bending over his shoulder. He was holding his pen in his hand over a pile
of disordered manuscript pages, absorbed in profound thought. He started
and said:

"Rasmussen, where do you come from?" He turned and actually saw Rasmussen
sitting reading at the foot of his bed wearing the Lloyd cap