Read "The Strange Boarders of Palace Crescent" by E. Phillips Oppenheim online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The end of that amazing day, however, had not arrived for Roger Ferrison. In the very act of crossing the threshold of his room and before he could have closed the door, which would effectually have blocked his hearing, his footsteps were arrested by one of those ordinary but quaintly disturbing sounds, of no account whatever in the busy daytime but curiously impressive in the dead silence of the night.
The telephone bell in the hall near the front door rang.