10:02 p.m. —Pale Flares the Darkness
Lieutenant Valcour wondered concerning Mrs. Endicott as he walked slowly across the corridor and knocked on the door of her room. A curious, curious woman, with youth and beauty that almost passed belief. He knew her instinctively as one of life’s misfits: complex to a note far beyond the common tune; essentially an individualist; essentially unhappy from an inevitable loneliness which is the lot of all who are banished within the narrow confines of their own complexity; a type he had seldom met, but of whose existence he was well aware.
Roberts opened the door. The woman’s face was butchered and her eyes had the quality of glass.
“Ask Mrs. Endicott, please, whether she feels strong enough to see me for a moment.”
Mrs. Endicott’s voice was definitely metallic. As it reached him in the corridor, disembodied from any visual association with herself, it seemed to hold a muted echo of brass bells.
“Certainly, come in. I wish, Lieutenant, you would give up the tiresome fiction that I am going to collapse. I’ll ring, Roberts, when I want you.”
“Yes, madam.”
As Roberts passed him on her way to the door Lieutenant Valcour felt an imperative awareness of an attempt at revelations—an attempt to impart to him some special knowledge. Her eyes, as she glanced at him, lost their cobwebs and grew sharply informative. It was entirely an unconscious