. The room
swam with him.

Then, as in a vision of horror, he saw himself standing there, as he had
stood many times before, listening for the last stroke, and suddenly
awaking from the dream to the crushing disappointment of the reality. For
one brief and terrible moment his whole memory was restored to him and he
knew that his madness was only madness, and nothing more, and that it
seized him in the same way, week by week, through the months and the
years, leaving him thus on the stroke of twelve each Wednesday night, a
broken, miserable, self-deceived man. As in certain dreams, we dream that
we have dreamed the same things before, so with him an endless calendar of
Wednesdays was unrolled before his inner sight, all alike, all ending in
the same terror of conscious madness.

He had dreamed it all, there was no one to come to him in his distress, no
one would ever enter that lonely room to bring back to him the treasures
of a glorious past, for there was no one to come. It had all been a dream
from beginning to end and there was no reality in it.

He staggered to his chair and sat down, pressing his lean hands to his
aching temples and rocking himself to and fro, his breath hissing through
his convulsively closed teeth. Still the fearful memory remained, and it
grew into a prophetic vision of the future, reflecting what had been upon
the distant scenery of what was yet to be. With that one deadly stroke of
the great church bell, all was gone--fortune, friends, wealth, dignity.
The majestic front of the palace of his hopes was but a flimsy, painted
tissue. The fire that ran through his tortured brain consumed the gaudy,
artificial thing in the flash and rush of a single flame, and left behind
only the charred skeleton framework, which had supported the vast canvas.
And then, he saw it again and again looming suddenly out of the darkness,
brightening into beauty and the semblance of strength, to be as suddenly
destroyed once more. With each frantic beat of his heart the awful
transformation was renewed. For dreams need not time to spin out their
intolerable length. With each burning throb of his raging blood, every
nerve in his body, every aching recess of his brain, was pierced and
twisted, and pierced again with unceasing agony.

Then a new horror was added to the rest. He saw before him the poor Polish
girl, her only beauty shorn away for his sake, he saw all that he had
promised in return, and he knew that he had