James looked at him with terror.

“Don’t mind me, boy,” said Gordon.  “I don’t mean to blaspheme; but Job is not in it with me just now.  You cannot imagine what I had to contend with before this melodramatic villain appeared on the stage.  Sometimes I think this is the finish,” Gordon’s mouth contracted.  He looked savage.  James continued to stare at him.  Gordon laid his hand on James’s shoulder.  “Thank the Lord for one thing,” he said almost tenderly, “that he sent you here.  Between us we will take care of poor little Clemency anyhow.  Now go to bed, and go to sleep.”

James obeyed as to the one, but he could not as to the other.  He became, as the hours wore on, so nervous that he was half-inclined to take a sleeping powder.  The room seemed full of flashes of lightning.  He heard sounds which made him cold with horror.  He was highly strung nervously, and was really in a state bordering upon hysteria.  The mystery which surrounded him was the main cause.  He was never himself before an unknown quantity.  He had too much imagination.  He made all sorts of surmises as to the stranger who was haunting Clemency.  Starting with two known quantities, he might have accomplished something, but here he had only one:  Clemency herself.  He had a good head for algebra, but a man cannot work out a problem easily with only one known quantity.  He began to wonder if the poor girl herself were sleeping.  He realized a sort of protective tenderness for her, and indignation on her behalf.  It did not occur to him as being love.  Still the image of her wonderful mother dominated him.  But his mind dwelt upon the girl.  He thought of a piazza whose roof opened as he knew upon Clemency’s room.  He wondered if a man like that would stick at anything.  Then he recalled what Doctor Gordon had said about Clemency’s not being in any bodily danger, and again he speculated.  The room began to grow pale with the late winter dawn.  Familiar objects began to gain clearness of outline.  There were two windows in James’s room.  They gave upon the piazza.  Suddenly James made a leap from his bed.  He sprang to one of the windows.  Flattened against it was the face of the man.  But the face was so destitute of consciousness of him, that James doubted if he saw rightly.  The wide eyes seemed to gaze upon him without seeing him, the mouth smiled as if at something within.  The next moment James was sure that the face was not there.  He drew on his trousers, thrust his feet into his shoes, and was out of his room and the house, and on the piazza.  It was still snowing, but the dawn was overcoming the storm.  The whole world was lit with dead white pallor like the face of a corpse.  James rushed the length of the piazza.  He looked at the walk leading to it.  He thought he could distinguish footprints.  He looked on the piazza, but the wind, being on the other side of the house, there was not enough snow there to make footprints visible.  The snow on the walk was drifted.