Description
The Shrieking Pit
CHAPTER I
Colwyn had never seen anything quite so eccentric in a public room as
the behaviour of the young man breakfasting alone at the alcove table in
the bay embrasure, and he became so absorbed in watching him that he
permitted his own meal to grow cold, impatiently waving away the waiter
who sought with obtrusive obsequiousness to recall his wandering
attention by thrusting the menu card before him.
To outward seeming the occupant of the alcove table was a good-looking
young man, whose clear blue eyes, tanned skin and well-knit frame
indicated the truly national product of common sense, cold water, and
out-of-door pursuits; of a wholesomely English if not markedly
intellectual type, pleasant to look at, and unmistakably of good birth
and breeding. When a young man of this description, your fellow guest at
a fashionable seaside hotel, who had been in the habit of giving you a
courteous nod on his morning journey across the archipelago of
snowy-topped tables under the convoy of the head waiter to his own
table, comes in to breakfast with shaking hands, flushed face, and
passes your table with unseeing eyes, you would probably conclude that
he was under the influence of liquor, and in your English way you would
severely blame him, not so much for the moral turpitude involved in his
excess as for the bad taste, which prompted him to show himself in public
in such a condition. If, on reaching his place, the young man’s conduct
took the additional extravagant form of picking up a table-knife and
sticking it into the table in front of him, you would probably enlarge
your previous conclusion by admitting the hypotheses of drugs or
dementia to account for such remarkable behaviour.
All these things were done by the young man at the alcove table in t
Product ID: 9781776779666
Sku: 9781776779666
