him? Had he ever suspected
him, Drene, of treachery after he, Graylock, had fulfilled his final
part of the bargain.

For a long time, now, a fierce curiosity concerning what Graylock was
thinking and doing had possessed Drene. What does a man, who is in good
physical health, do, when he is at liberty to compute to the very second
how many seconds of life remain for him?

Drene's sick brain ached with the problem day and night.

In November the snow fell. Drene had not been out except in imagination.

Day after day, in imagination, he had followed Graylock, night after
night, slyly, stealthily, shirking after him through busy avenues at
midday, lurking by shadowy houses at midnight, burning to see what
expression this man wore, what was imprinted on his features;--obsessed
by a desire to learn what he might be thinking--with death drawing
nearer.

But Drene, in the body, had never stirred from his own chilly room--a
gaunt, fierce-eyed thing, unkempt, half-clothed, huddled all day in his
chair brooding above his bitten nails, or flung starkly across his couch
at night staring at the stars through the dirty crust of glass above.

One night in December when the stars were all staring steadily back at
him, and his thoughts were out somewhere in the darkness following his
enemy, he heard somebody laughing in the room.

For a while he lay very still, listening; but when he realized that the
laughter was his own he sat up, pressing his temples between hot and
trembling fingers.

It seemed to silence the laughter: terror subsided to a tremulous
apprehension--as though he had been on the verge of something horrible
sinking into it for a moment--but had escaped.

Again he found himself thinking of Graylock, and presently he laughed;
then frightened, checked himself. But his fevered brain had been afire
too long; he lay fighting with his thoughts to hold them in leash lest
they slip out into the night like blood hounds on the trail of the man
they had dogged so long.

Trembling, terrified, he set his teeth in his bleeding lip, and clenched
his gaunt fists: He could not hold his thoughts in leash; could not
control the terrifying laughter; hatred blazed like hell-fire scorching
the soul in him, searing his aching brain with flames which destroy.

In the darkness he struggled blindly to his feet; and he saw the stars
through the glass roof all ablaze in the midnight sky; saw the infernal
flicker of pale flames in the o