octor's voice. He appeared at the
end of the corridor, showing Allan and Midwinter the way to their rooms.
They all went together into Number Four. After a little, the doctor
came out first. He waited till Midwinter joined him, and pointed with
a formal bow to the door of Number Three. Midwinter entered the room
without speaking, and shut himself in. The doctor, left alone, withdrew
to the staircase door and unlocked it, then waited in the corridor,
whistling to himself softly, under his breath.

Voices pitched cautiously low became audible in a minute more in the
hall. The Resident Dispenser and the Head Nurse appeared, on their way
to the dormitories of the attendants at the top of the house. The man
bowed silently, and passed the doctor; the woman courtesied silently,
and followed the man. The doctor acknowledged their salutations by a
courteous wave of his hand; and, once more left alone, paused a moment,
still whistling softly to himself, then walked to the door of Number
Four, and opened the case of the fumigating apparatus fixed near it
in the corner of the wall. As he lifted the lid and looked in, his
whistling ceased. He took a long purple bottle out, examined it by the
gas-light, put it back, and closed the case. This done, he advanced on
tiptoe to the open staircase door, passed through it, and secured it on
the inner side as usual.

Mr. Bashwood had seen him at the apparatus; Mr. Bashwood had noticed the
manner of his withdrawal through the staircase door. Again the sense of
an unutterable expectation throbbed at his heart. A terror that was slow
and cold and deadly crept into his hands, and guided them in the dark
to the key that had been left for him in the inner side of the door. He
turned it in vague distrust of what might happen next, and waited.

The slow minutes passed, and nothing happened. The silence was horrible;
the solitude of the lonely corridor was a solitude of invisible
treacheries. He began to count to keep his mind employed--to keep his
own growing dread away from him. The numbers, as he whispered them,
followed each other slowly up to a hundred, and still nothing happened.
He had begun the second hundred; he had got on to twenty--when, without
a sound to betray that he had been moving in his room, Midwinter
suddenly appeared in the corridor.

He stood for a moment and listened; he went to the stairs and looked
over into the hall beneath. Then, for the second time that night, he
tried