face was not the face of the philosophic
master of Life now.

"You said she shouldn't--little Pattie Hines you know--you said she
shouldn't--"

Romarin sprang half from his chair, and brought his fist down on the
table.

"And by Heaven, she didn't! At least that's one thing you haven't done!"

Marsden too had risen unsteadily.

"Oho, oho? You think that?"

A wild thought flashed across Romarin's brain.

"You mean--?"

"I mean?... Oho, oho! Yes, I mean! She did, Romarin...."

The mirrors, mistily seen through the smoke of half a hundred cigars and
cigarettes, the Loves and Shepherdesses of the garish walls, the diners
starting up in their places, all suddenly seemed to swing round in a
great half-circle before Romarin's eyes. The next moment, feeling as if
he stood on something on which he found it difficult to keep his balance,
he had caught up the table-knife with which he had peeled the pear and
had struck at the side of Marsden's neck. The rounded blade snapped, but
he struck again with the broken edge, and left the knife where it
entered. The table appeared uptilted almost vertical; over it Marsden's
head disappeared; it was followed by a shower of glass, cigars,
artificial flowers and the tablecloth at which he clutched; and the
dirty American cloth of the table top was left bare.

* * * * *

But the edge behind which Marsden's face had disappeared remained
vertical. A group of scene-shifters were moving a flat of scenery from a
theatre into a tumbril-like cart...

And Romarin knew that, past, present, and future, he had seen it all in
an instant, and that Marsden stood behind that painted wing.

And he knew, too, that he had only to wait until that flat passed and to
take Marsden's arm and enter the restaurant, _and it would be so_. A
drowning man is said to see all in one unmeasurable instant of time; a
year-long dream is but, they say, an instantaneous arrangement in the
moment of waking of the molecules we associate with ideas; and the past
of history and the future of prophecy are folded up in the mystic moment
we call the present....

_It would come true_....

For one moment Romarin stood; the next, he had turned and run for his
life.

At the corner of the street he collided with a loafer, and only the wall
saved them from going down. Feverishly Romarin plunged his hand into his
pocket and brought out a handful of silver. He crammed it into the
loafer's han