s
delirious or drunk. He had a sense of reality such as material things
could never give him. His intellectual content seemed to submit
passively to it, and it fitted like a glove everything that had ever
preceded it in his life. It did not muddle him. It was like a problem
whose answer he knew on paper, yet whose solution he was unable to
grasp. He was far beyond horror. He had sunk through the thin surface of
that, now moved in a region where the feet and the fear of white walls
were real, living things, things he must accept. Only far inside his
soul a little fire leaped and cried that something was pulling him down,
trying to get him inside a door and slam it behind him. After that door
was slammed there would be only footfalls and white buildings in the
moonlight, and perhaps he would be one of the footfalls.

During the five or ten minutes he waited in the shadow of the fence,
there was somehow this fire... that was as near as he could name it
afterward. He remembered calling aloud:

"I want some one stupid. Oh, send some one stupid!" This to the
black fence opposite him, in whose shadows the footsteps shuffled
... shuffled. He supposed "stupid" and "good" had become somehow
intermingled through previous association. When he called thus it was
not an act of will at all--will had turned him away from the moving
figure in the street; it was almost instinct that called, just the pile
on pile of inherent tradition or some wild prayer from way over the
night. Then something clanged like a low gong struck at a distance,
and before his eyes a face flashed over the two feet, a face pale and
distorted with a sort of infinite evil that twisted it like flame in
the wind; _but he knew, for the half instant that the gong tanged and
hummed, that it was the face of Dick Humbird._

Minutes later he sprang to his feet, realizing dimly that there was no
more sound, and that he was alone in the graying alley. It was cold, and
he started on a steady run for the light that showed the street at the
other end.

*****

AT THE WINDOW

It was late morning when he woke and found the telephone beside his bed
in the hotel tolling frantically, and remembered that he had left word
to be called at eleven. Sloane was snoring heavily, his clothes in a
pile by his bed. They dressed and ate breakfast in silence, and then
sauntered out to get some air. Amory's mind was working slowly, trying
to assimilate what had happened and separ