'
'Which I extend with all my heart.'
That was not altogether true.
Dr. Dorrimore thanked me as he seated himself
beside me, and I drove cautiously forward, as before.
Doubtless it is fancy, but it seems to me now that the
remaining distance was made in a chill fog; that
I was uncomfortably cold; that the way was longer
than ever before, and the town, when we reached
it, cheerless, forbidding, and desolate. It must have
been early in the evening, yet I do not recollect a light
in any of the houses nor a living thing in the streets.
Dorrimore explained at some length how he hap-
pened to be there, and where he had been during
the years that had elapsed since I had seen him.
I recall the fact of the narrative, but none of the
facts narrated. He had been in foreign countries and
had returned--this is all that my memory retains,
and this I already knew. As to myself I cannot
remember that I spoke a word, though doubtless
I did.
Of one thing I am distinctly conscious: the man's
presence at my side was strangely distasteful and
disquieting--so much so that when I at last pulled
up under the lights of the Putnam House I experi-
enced a sense of having escaped some spiritual peril
of a nature peculiarly forbidding. This sense of
relief was somewhat modified by the discovery that
Dr. Dorrimore was living at the same hotel.
2
In partial explanation of my feelings regarding
Dr.
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