on again like a run-down watch in which the key had
suddenly been inserted, and she would feel the key grinding round and
round and round in a winding-up process that was even more dreadful than
the running-down. Then would come agonies of heat and thirst, a sense of
being strung to breaking-point, and her heart would race and race till,
appalled, she clasped it with her fevered hands and held it back,
feeling herself on the verge of destruction.

And through all this dreadful nightmare she never slept. She was hedged
about by a fiery ring of sleeplessness that scorched her eyeballs
whichever way she turned, giving her no rest. Sometimes indeed dreams
came to her, but they were waking dreams of such vivid horror as almost
to dwarf her reality of pain. She moved continually through a furnace
that only abated when the exhausted faculties began to run down and the
deathly chill took her into fresh torments.

Once, lying very near to death, she opened her sleepless eyes upon Max's
face. He was stooping over her, holding her nerveless hand very tightly
in his own while he pressed a needle-point into her arm. That, she knew,
was the preliminary to the winding-up process. It had happened to her
before--many times she fancied.

She made a feeble--a piteously feeble--effort to resist him. On the
instant his eyes were upon her face. She saw the green glint of them and
quivered at the sight. His face was as carved granite in the weird light
that danced so fantastically to her reeling brain.

"Yes," he said grimly. "You are coming back."

Then she knew that his will, indomitable, inflexible, was holding her
fast, heedless of all the longing of her heart to escape. Then she knew
that he, and only he, was the unknown power that kept her back from
peace, forcing her onward in that dread circle, compelling her to live
in torment. And in that moment she feared him as the victim fears the
torturer, not asking for mercy, partly because she lacked the strength
and partly because she knew--how hopelessly!--that she would ask in
vain.

He did not speak to her again. He was fully occupied, it seemed, with
what he had to do. Only, when he had finished, he put his hand over her
eyes, compelling them to close, and so remained for what seemed to her a
long, long time. For a while she vibrated like a sensitive instrument
under his touch, and then very strangely there stole upon her for the
first time a sense of comfort. When he took his hand