breast. Nothing had induced him to loose it
from both hands at once. The priceless value of the umbrella was the one
clearly-defined notion that illuminated his poor devastated brain. I left
him to his inanimate companion.

II

I should have left then, though I had a wish not to leave. But I was
prevented from going by the fear of descending those sinister stairs
alone, and the necessity of calling aloud to the concierge in order to
get out through the main door, and the possible difficulties in finding a
cab in that region at that hour. I knew that I could not have borne to
walk even to the end of the street unprotected. So I stayed where I was,
seated in a chair near the window of the larger room, saturating myself
in the vague and heavy flood of sadness that enwraps the fretful,
passionate city in the night--the night when the commonest noises seem to
carry some mystic message to the listening soul, the night when truth
walks abroad naked and whispers her secrets.

A gas-lamp threw its radiance on the ceiling in bars through the slits of
the window-shutters, and then, far in the middle wilderness of the night,
the lamp was extinguished by a careful municipality, and I was left in
utter darkness. Long since the candles had burnt away. I grew silly and
sentimental, and pictured the city in feverish sleep, gaining with
difficulty inadequate strength for the morrow--as if the city had not
been living this life for centuries and did not know exactly what it was
about! And then, sure as I had been that I could not sleep, I woke up,
and I could see the outline of the piano. Dawn had begun. And not a sound
disturbed the street, and not a sound came from Diaz' bedroom. As of old,
he slept with the tranquillity of a child.

And after a time I could see the dust on the piano and on the polished
floor under the table. The night had passed, and it appeared to be almost
a miracle that the night had passed, and that I had lived through it and
was much the same Carlotta still. I gently opened the window and pushed
back the shutters. A young woman, tall, with a superb bust, clothed in
blue, was sweeping the footpath in long, dignified strokes of a broom.
She went slowly from my ken. Nothing could have been more prosaic, more
sane, more astringent. And yet only a few hours--and it had been night,
strange, voluptuous night! And even now a thousand thousand pillows were
warm and crushed under their burden of unconscious dream