He pursued his occupation mechanically, deriving no sort of impression from what he was reading.
It was as if a shadow from the curtained bed had got between his mind and the gayly printed letters--a shadow that nothing could dispel.

At last he gave up the struggle, threw the card from him impatiently, and took to walking softly up and down the room again.
The dead man, the dead man, the _hidden_ dead man on the bed! There was the one persistent idea still haunting him.

Hidden! Was it only the body being there, or was it the body being there _concealed,_ that was preying on his mind?
He stopped at the window with that doubt in him, once more listening to the pattering rain, once more looking out into the black darkness.
Still the dead man! The darkness forced his mind back upon itself, and set his memory at work, reviving with a painfully vivid distinctness the momentary impression it had received from his first sight of the corpse.

Before long the face seemed to be hovering out in the middle of the darkness, confronting him through the window, with the paleness whiter--with the dreadful dull line of light between the imperfectly-closed eyelids broader than he had seen it--with the parted lips slowly dropping further and further away from each other--with the features growing larger and moving closer, till they seemed to fill the window, and to silence the rain, and to shut out the night.
The sound of a voice shouting below stairs woke him suddenly from the dream of his own distempered fancy.

He recognized it as the voice of the landlord.
"Shut up at twelve, Ben," he heard it say.