op in mental
temperature now calming to normal? Hadn't he exaggerated the
complication of Anne's bequest? There was a way out of it; there must
be, a sane, practical way to satisfy what she wished and what she might
be supposed to wish now. He comforted himself with the pious sophistry
of an Anne raised on the wind of death above early inconclusions and so,
of course, agreeing with him who didn't have to pass the gates of
mystery to be so raised. He knew enough, evidently, so that he didn't
need to die to know more. His letter to Dick seemed of inconsiderable
importance, even the disaster of its reaching Amelia. If she held him up
to it, he could laugh it off. Anything could be laughed off. So, the
shadows mingling with the inconsequence of his thoughts, he drifted away
to sleep, catching himself back, now and then, to luxuriate in the
assurance that he was in the right place, finding comfortable
assuagements, and that inexplicably, because so suddenly, everything was
for the best in a mysterious but probably entirely unaccountable world.

At four o'clock he woke. He had not for a moment last night expected
this. Four o'clock had been for months the hour of his tryst with the
powers of darkness. They hovered over him then with dull grey wings
extended, from sunrise to sunset, from east to west. He never had the
courage to peer up at them and see how far the wings really did reach.
They covered his mortal sky, and when he refused to stare up into their
leaden pinions, they stooped to him and buffeted and smothered him,
until he was such a mass of bruised suffering within that he could
almost believe his body also was quivering into the numbness of
acquiescent misery. And here were the wings again. They were even lower,
in spite of this clear air. They did not merely shut it out from his
nostrils, but the filthy pinions swept his face and roused in him the
uttermost revulsion of mortal man against the accident of his mortality.
The trouble of earth passed before him in its unceasing panorama, a
pageant of pain and death. Every atom of creation was against every
other atom, because everywhere was warfare, murder and rapine, for the
mere chance of living. He had won his inherited chance by sheer luck of
contest through millions of years while his forebears came up from the
slime and the cave. The little hunted creature, shrieking out there in
the wood in the clutch of a predatory enemy was not so lucky. It was the
enemy who