Page:Mystery of the Yellow Room (Grosset Dunlap 1908).djvu/221

 be once more in danger. 'It will not greatly astonish me if something happens to-morrow night,' he avowed, 'and yet I must be absent. I cannot be back at the Glandier before the morning of the day after to-morrow.'"

"I asked him to explain himself, and this is all he would tell me. His anticipation of coming danger had come to him solely from the coincidence that Mademoiselle Stangerson had been twice attacked, and both times when he had been absent. On the night of the incident of the inexplicable gallery he had been obliged to be away from the Glandier.  On the night of the tragedy in The Yellow Room he had also not been able to be at the Glandier, though this was the first time he had declared himself on the matter.  Now a man so moved who would still go away must be acting under compulsion—must be obeying a will stronger than his own.  That was how I reasoned, and I told him so.  He replied 'Perhaps.'—I asked him if Mademoiselle Stangerson was compelling him.  He protested that she was not.  His determination to go to Paris had been taken without any conference with Mademoiselle Stangerson.

"To cut the story short, he repeated that his belief in the possibility of a fresh attack was founded entirely on the extraordinary coincidence. 'If anything happens to Mademoiselle Stangerson,' he said, 'it would be terrible for both of us.  For her, because her life would be in danger; for me because I could neither defend her from the attack nor tell of where I had been.  I am perfectly aware of the suspicions cast on me.  The