ere. Strive
as he would, he could not shake off the thought of her nor the image of
her face. She haunted him.

But for her to come at that moment of all moments!... Really, it was past
belief! How she could endure it, Oleron could not conceive! Actually, to
look on, as it were, at the triumph of a Rival.... Good God! It was
monstrous! tact--reticence--he had never credited her with an
overwhelming amount of either: but he had never attributed mere--oh,
there was no word for it! Monstrous--monstrous! Did she intend
thenceforward.... Good God! To look on!...

Oleron felt the blood rush up to the roots of his hair with anger against
her.

"Damnation take her!" he choked....

But the next moment his heat and resentment had changed to a cold sweat
of cowering fear. Panic-stricken, he strove to comprehend what he had
done. For though he knew not what, he knew he had done something,
something fatal, irreparable, blasting. Anger he had felt, but not _this_
blaze of ire that suddenly flooded the twilight of his consciousness with
a white infernal light. _That_ appalling flash was not his--not his
_that_ open rift of bright and searing Hell--not his, not his! His had
been the hand of a child, preparing a puny blow; but what was _this
other_ horrific hand that was drawn back to strike in the same place? Had
_he_ set that in motion? Had _he_ provided the spark that had touched off
the whole accumulated power of that formidable and relentless place? He
did not know. He only knew that that poor igniting particle in himself
was blown out, that--Oh, impossible!--a clinging kiss (how else to
express it?) had changed on his very lips to a gnashing and a removal,
and that for very pity of the awful odds he must cry out to her against
whom he had lately raged to guard herself ... guard herself....

"_Look out!_" he shrieked aloud....

* * * * *

The revulsion was instant. As if a cold slow billow had broken over him,
he came to to find that he was lying in his bed, that the mist and horror
that had for so long enwrapped him had departed, that he was Paul Oleron,
and that he was sick, naked, helpless, and unutterably abandoned and
alone. His faculties, though weak, answered at last to his calls upon
them; and he knew that it must have been a hideous nightmare that had
left him sweating and shaking thus.

Yes, he was himself, Paul Oleron, a tired novelist, already past the
summit of his best work, an