ies above her fiance, and perhaps, she
reasons, there is interference of a sort here. Someday maybe she will
catch them with all their tubes off. Margaret is a romantic, but she is
engaged and thus is entitled.

* * * * *

Beyond the entrance that is guarded by the stout wooden door is a larger
room, darker, quieter, one step more removed from the hurrying hallway.
A massive but neat desk is placed before the one set of windows, the
blinds of which are kept closed but tilted toward the sky so that an
aura of pale light is continually seeping through. The main illumination
comes from several lamps placed in strategic corners, their bulbs turned
away from the occupants of the room.

To one side of the desk is a comfortable-looking deep chair, with
leather arms and a back quite high enough to support one's head. In
front of this is the traditional couch, armless but well-upholstered and
comfortable. At the moment Dr. Victor Quink was sitting not in the deep
chair but in the swivel chair behind the desk. His glasses were lying on
the desk next to his feet, the chair was pushed back as far as it might
safely be, his arms were stretched out to their extremity, and his mouth
was straining open, as if to split his cheeks. Dr. Quink was yawning.

His method of quick relaxation was that of the blank mind; he was at
this very moment forcibly evicting all vestiges of thought from his
head; he was concentrating intently on black, on depth, on absolute
silence. He was able to maintain this discipline for perhaps a second,
or a second and a half at most, and then his mind began, imperceptibly
at the first, to slip off along a path of its own liking, leading Dr.
Quink quietly and unprotestingly along. The path is narrow, crinkly,
bending back upon itself. It is not a path for vehicles, but one worn by
a single pair of boots, plodding patiently, slowly, wearily. The path
runs, or creeps, through a wild and desolate district where hardly more
than a single blade of grass shoots up at random from the bottomless
drift-sand. Instead of the garden that normally embellishes a castle
(there is in the vague distance a blurred castle), the fortified walls
are approached on the landward side by a scant forest of firs, on the
other by the snow-swept Baltic Sea. Spanish moss hangs limply from the
evergrays, disdainful of the sun and of its reflection by sea; the
scene is somber and restful, serene, and flat.

The