ter of that dog now--his broken leg, eh? What are you to
make of that? And take this queer state she's in. There's no doubt in my
mind, Mr. Hunt--the poor girl's gone crazy, somehow. You nor me can't
tell how nor why. But it's back of all this--that's sure."

Throughout all this coarse nightmare, this insane break in Nature, as I
have called it and must always regard it, let me at least be honest. As
Conlon spoke, for the tiniest fraction of a second a desolating fear
darted through me, searing every nerve with white-hot pain. Was it true?
Might it not conceivably be true? But this single lightning-thrust of
doubt passed as it came. No, not as it came, for it blotted all
clearness, all power of voluntary thought from my mind; but it left
behind it a singular intensity of vision. Even as the lightning-pang
vanished, and while time yet stood still, a moving picture that amounted
to hallucination began to play itself out before me. It was like

_... that last
Wild pageant of the accumulated past
That clangs and flashes for a drowning man._

I saw Susan shutting the door of a delicately panelled Georgian room,
and every detail of this room--a room I had never entered in the
flesh--was distinct to me. Given time, I could have inventoried its
every object. I saw Gertrude lying on--not a couch, as Conlon had called
it--on a _chaise-longue_, a book with a vivid green cover in her left
hand, a bronze paper knife with a thin, pointed blade in her right. She
was holding it with the knuckles of her hand upward, her thumb along the
handle, and the point of the blade turned to her left, across and a
little in toward her body. She was wearing a very lovely _neglige_, a
true creation, all in filmy tones of old gold. On a low-set tip-table at
her elbow stood a reading-lamp, and a small coal-black French bull lay
asleep on a superb Chinese rug--lay close in by the _chaise-longue_,
just where a dropped hand might caress him. A light silky-looking
coverlet of a peculiar dull blue, harmonizing with certain tones of the
rug, was thrown across Gertrude's feet.

As Susan shut the door, the little bull pricked up his bat-ears and
started to uncurl, but Gertrude must have spoken to him, for he settled
back again--not, however, to sleep. It was all a picture; I heard no
sounds. Then I saw Gertrude put down her book on the table and swing her
feet from the _chaise-longue_, meaning to rise an