The first week Frederick regularly took his midday meal with the two physicians in a boarding-house.  Towards dusk he always returned to his Diogenes tub, usually on foot.

The next week he did not visit his friends so often, why, he himself did not know.  He slept badly.  Again and again the electric bells haunted his dreams.  Even in his waking hours, he easily took fright, a condition to which in former times he had been a perfect stranger.  If a sleigh with bells actually did pass the house, he was sometimes so alarmed that he trembled.  That he should hear his own breathing in the silence of his room did not surprise him; but it perturbed him strangely to listen to it.  Sometimes he had chills.  As a physician he kept a clinical thermometer, and on several occasions ascertained that he had some temperature.  These circumstances disquieted him.  He seemed to be living in an atmosphere producing mild shocks and alarms, which he tried in vain to dispel.  Once, when he was starting off to lunch with Peter Schmidt, a disinclination to leave his room and lack of appetite kept him back.  Another time it was complete exhaustion that turned him homeward again when he was half way on the road to Meriden.  He could scarcely drag himself back to the house.  His friends never learned anything of these secret experiences of his.  It did not seem odd to them if now and then he should prefer to remain alone under his own roof.

Over him came creeping a strange life, growing ever stranger.  The world, the sky, the landscape, the country, everything that fell within his vision, even the human beings he met changed.  They moved away.  Their affairs took on a remote, alien character.  Indeed, his own affairs underwent a change.  They had been taken from him.  Somebody had led them aside for a time.  Later, perhaps, he would find them again, provided the goal of his altered condition remained the same as his former goal.

At length Peter Schmidt became observant of his friend’s retired existence.  When he expressed his solicitude, Frederick repulsed him somewhat brusquely.  Even his friend had grown remote.  He betrayed nothing of that oppressive atmosphere of alarm in which he was enclosed.  Curiously, there was a secret fascination in it, which he was loath to share with any one and so have it disturbed.

On a starless, pitch-black night, he was sitting, as usual, in his lonely house at his desk beside his lamp, when it seemed to him that someone was bending over his shoulder.  He was holding his pen in his hand over a pile of disordered manuscript pages, absorbed in profound thought.  He started and said: 

“Rasmussen, where do you come from?” He turned and actually saw Rasmussen sitting reading at the foot of his bed wearing the Lloyd cap in which he had come from his trip around the world.

“How tremendously interesting!” he thought, and carefully studied the apparition from head to foot.  He could see where the stuff of his jacket and the lining joined.  He could distinguish the buttons on his waistcoat, and noted that the last one was off.  Rasmussen was holding a clinical thermometer in his hand with the manner and attitude of a nurse who is passing unoccupied time at the patient’s bed reading.