th with the air of a
sympathetic dentist. And as the Warden made a run for the window
and balcony, his benefactor followed him with a firm step
and a compassionate expression.

"Both men were perhaps surprised to see that the gray and white
of early daybreak had already come. One of them, however,
had emotions calculated to swallow up surprise. Brakespeare College
was one of the few that retained real traces of Gothic ornament,
and just beneath Dr. Eames's balcony there ran out what had perhaps
been a flying buttress, still shapelessly shaped into gray beasts
and devils, but blinded with mosses and washed out with rains.
With an ungainly and most courageous leap, Eames sprang out on this
antique bridge, as the only possible mode of escape from the maniac.
He sat astride of it, still in his academic gown, dangling his
long thin legs, and considering further chances of flight.
The whitening daylight opened under as well as over him that
impression of vertical infinity already remarked about the little
lakes round Brakespeare. Looking down and seeing the spires
and chimneys pendent in the pools, they felt alone in space.
They felt as if they were looking over the edge from the North Pole
and seeing the South Pole below.

"`Hang the world, we said,' observed Smith, `and the world is hanged.
"He has hanged the world upon nothing," says the Bible. Do you like being
hanged upon nothing? I'm going to be hanged upon something myself.
I'm going to swing for you... Dear, tender old phrase,' he murmured;
`never true till this moment. I am going to swing for you.
For you, dear friend. For your sake. At your express desire.'

"`Help!' cried the Warden of Brakespeare College; `help!'

"`The puppy struggles,' said the undergraduate, with an eye of pity,
`the poor puppy struggles. How fortunate it is that I am wiser
and kinder than he,' and he sighted his weapon so as exactly to cover
the upper part of Eames's bald head.

"`Smith,' said the philosopher with a sudden change to a sort
of ghastly lucidity, `I shall go mad.'

"`And so look at things from the right angle,' observed Smith,
sighing gently. `Ah, but madness is only a palliative at best,
a drug. The only cure is an operation--an operation that is
always successful: death.'

"As he spoke the sun rose. It seemed to put colour into everything,
with the rapidity of a lightning artist. A fleet of little
clouds sailing across the sky changed from pigeon-gray t