3:00 a.m. —Thin Haze of Dread
Dr. Worth, too, was staring at the black, impenetrable rectangle left by the opened window. It was a passageway for air, but infinitely more so was it a passageway leading to obscure recesses of the night: recesses that seemed to offer a maleficent sanctuary to hell-born secrets of distorted souls.
Who had crept along that balcony and fired that shot?
The apparent improbability of anyone from Mrs. Endicott’s room having done so transplanted the problem from clear fields of logic and of simple facts into vague regions of absurd conjecturings which stared wanly out at Lieutenant Valcour through baffling curtains of darkness and of fog.
He felt a definite sense of uncertainty, and—as one does when confronted by a suggestion of the unknown—an impalpable dread. It was nothing that he could put his finger on; it seemed, absurdly, some emanation from the outer night creeping in through that rectangle of black to hang in thin hazes about the room.
“What would you suggest doing with Hollander, Doctor?” he said.
Dr. Worth, whose own thoughts had been warily browsing in disagreeable pastures, sought relief in professional preciseness.
“He would be better off in a hospital, Lieutenant. I consider his constitution to be more than sufficiently strong to obviate any danger in moving him. Are you going to arrest him?”