omatic gestures--returned like sad little outcasts
pleading with him. Faces he could not remember and that were yet
familiar peered at him in his sleeplessness with poignant eyes that
frightened.

There would come to him the memory of the time he had been a boy and had
lain like this in his mother's home, startled with fears that sat like
insanities in his throat. The memory of his being a boy seemed to
restore him to the fears long forgotten. Words would come ... "I was a
boy ..." and he would lie thinking of how people grew old; of how he had
grown old without seeming to change, and yet changing--as if he had been
gently vanishing from himself and even now was moving slowly away. He
was like a house from which issued a dim procession of guests never
pausing for farewells. He had been a boy, a youth, a man ... each
containing days and thoughts. And they moved slowly away from
him--completed figures fully dressed. Slowly, without farewells, with
faces intensely familiar yet no longer known. Thus he would continue to
vanish from himself, remaining unchanged but diminishing, until there
were no more guests to forsake and he stood alone waiting a last
farewell--a curious, unimaginable good-bye to himself. Nothing ...
nothing. A long wait for a good-bye. And then nothing again. Already he
was half shadow--half a procession of Erik Dorns walking away from him
and growing dimmer.

In the dark of the strange room, his eyes staring and fearful, he would
reach suddenly for Anna, embracing her almost as if she were beside him.
Her smile that forever shone upon him like the light of lilies and
candles from a sad, quiet altar; her words that forever flowed like a
dream from her heart, the warmth of her body that she offered him as if
it no longer existed for herself--to these his loneliness sought vainly
to carry him. And he would find himself tormented by a desire for her,
lying with her name on his lips and her image alone alive in the empty
dread of his thought.

United again in their home, he lapsed into the unconsciousness of her,
sometimes vaguely startled by the tears he felt on her cheeks as they
lay together at night. Out of this unconsciousness he made continual
love to her, giving her back her endearments and caresses. Of this he
never tired. His kisses unaware of her, his tendernesses without meaning
to him, he yet felt in her presence the shadow of a desire. The love
that filled his wife seemed to animate his phrase