urious gold, and glowing brooches in enamel, and poured out jewels
before him from a silver box, and then she stripped from her body her
precious robes, and stood in the glowing mist of her hair, and held out
her arms to him. But he raised his eyes and saw the mould and decay
gaining on the walls of a dismal room, and a gloomy paper was dropping to
the rotting floor. A vapor of the grave entered his nostrils, and he
cried out with a loud scream; but there was only an indistinct guttural
murmur in his throat.

And presently the woman fled away from him, and he pursued her. She fled
away before him through midnight country, and he followed after her,
chasing her from thicket to thicket, from valley to valley. And at last
he captured her and won her with horrible caresses, and they went up to
celebrate and make the marriage of the Sabbath. They were within the
matted thicket, and they writhed in the flames, insatiable, for ever.
They were tortured, and tortured one another, in the sight of thousands
who gathered thick about them; and their desire rose up like a black
smoke.

Without, the storm swelled to the roaring of an awful sea, the wind grew
to a shrill long scream, the elm-tree was riven and split with the crash
of a thunderclap. To Lucian the tumult and the shock came as a gentle
murmur, as if a brake stirred before a sudden breeze in summer. And then
a vast silence overwhelmed him.

A few minutes later there was a shuffling of feet in the passage, and the
door was softly opened. A woman came in, holding a light, and she peered
curiously at the figure sitting quite still in the chair before the desk.
The woman was half dressed, and she had let her splendid bronze hair flow
down, her cheeks were flushed, and as she advanced into the shabby room,
the lamp she carried cast quaking shadows on the moldering paper, patched
with marks of rising damp, and hanging in strips from the wet, dripping
wall. The blind had not been drawn, but no light or glimmer of light
filtered through the window, for a great straggling box tree that beat
the rain upon the panes shut out even the night. The woman came softly,
and as she bent down over Lucian an argent gleam shone from her brown
eyes, and the little curls upon her neck were like golden work upon
marble. She put her hand to his heart, and looked up, and beckoned to
some one who was waiting by the door.

"Come in, Joe," she said. "It's just as I thought it would be: 'Death by
mi