Explore "A Silent Witness" by R. Austin Freeman on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
THOBNDYKE'S warning, so emphatically expressed, ought to have been alike unnecessary and effective. As a matter of fact, it was neither. I suppose that to a young man, not naturally timorous, the idea of a constantly lurking danger amidst the prosaic conditions of modern civilization is one that is not readily accepted. At any rate, the fact is that I continued to walk abroad by day and by night with as much unconcern as if nothing unusual had ever befallen me. It was not that the recollection of those horrible hours in the poisoned cellar had in any way faded. That incident I could never forget. But I think, that in the back of my mind, there still lingered the idea of a homicidal lunatic; though that idea had been so scornfully rejected by Thorndyke.
But before I describe the amazing experience by which I once more came within a hair's breadth of sudden and violent death, I must refer to another incident; not because it seemed to be connected with that alarming occurrence, but because it came first in the order of time, and had its own significance later.