I trust
I am not superstitious, but the vision had remained with me in all its
tormenting detail. A veiled woman had grimly awaited him as he
struggled with his uniformed captors. I mean to say, he was being
hustled along by two constables.
That day, let me now put down, was to be a day of the most fearful
shocks that a man of rather sensitive nervous organism has ever been
called upon to endure. There are now lines in my face that I make no
doubt showed then for the first time.
And it was a day that dragged interminably, so that I became fair off
my head with the suspense of it, feeling that at any moment the worst
might happen. For hours I saw no one with whom I could consult. Once I
was almost moved to call up Belknap-Jackson, so intolerable was the
menacing uncertainty; but this I knew bordered on hysteria, and I
restrained the impulse with an iron will.
But I wretchedly longed for a sight of Cousin Egbert or the Mixer, or
even of the Honourable George; some one to assure me that my horrid
dream of the night before had been a baseless fabric, as the saying
is. The very absence of these people and of his lordship was in itself
ominous.
Nervously I kept to a post at one of my windows where I could survey
the street. And here at mid-day I sustained my first shock.
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