red-dollar notes. Whitaker regarded this circumstance as a
special dispensation of Providence to save him the bother of stopping at
the bank on his way up-town; drew his personal check for the right
amount and left it with a memorandum under the paper-weight on
Drummond's desk; put a match to a shredded pile of personal
correspondence in the fireplace; and caught a train at the Grand Central
at one-three.

Not until the cars were in motion did he experience any sense of
security from Peter Stark. He had been apprehensive until that moment of
some unforeseen move on the part of his friend; Peter was capable of
wide but sure casts of intuition on occasion, especially where his
affections were touched. But now Whitaker felt free, free to abandon
himself to meditative despair; and he did it, as he did most things,
thoroughly. He plunged headlong into an everlasting black pit of terror.
He considered the world through the eyes of a man sick unto death, and
found it without health. Behind him lay his home, a city without a
heart, a place of pointing fingers and poisoned tongues; before him the
brief path of Fear that he must tread: his broken, sword-wide span
leaping out over the Abyss....

He was anything but a patient man at all times, and anything but sane in
that dark hour. Cold horror crawled in his brain like a delirium--horror
of himself, of his morbid flesh, of that moribund body unfit to sheathe
the clean fire of life. The thought of struggling to keep animate that
corrupt Self, tainted by the breath of Death, was invincibly terrible to
him. All sense of human obligation disappeared from his cosmos; remained
only the biting hunger for eternal peace, rest, freedom from the bondage
of existence....

At about four o'clock the train stopped to drop the dining-car. Wholly
swayed by blind impulse, Whitaker got up, took his hand-bag and left the
car.

On the station platform he found himself pelted by a pouring rain. He
had left Town in a sodden drizzle, dull and dismal enough in all
conscience; here was a downpour out of a sky three shades lighter than
India ink--a steadfast, grim rain that sluiced the streets like a
gigantic fire-hose, brimming the gutters with boiling, muddy torrents.

The last to leave the train, he found himself without a choice of
conveyances; but one remained at the edge of the platform, an aged and
decrepit four-wheeler whose patriarchal driver upon the box might have
been Death himself masque