see you--the excess," he added, with a light laugh, "being due to the
fact that I am going your way, and naturally expect an invitation to
ride with you."

"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 happened 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 experienced 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.

II