er
teeth gleamed like little deaths. She lay motionless as Mallare had
flung her.

Goliath shuffled to the couch. His huge black face stared over her
closed eyes.

[Illustration: Third Drawing]

[III]

He remembered that he had thrown the girl against the wall and he
paused. The street was black. Great shadows balanced themselves on his
eyes.

"I have escaped from myself," he muttered.

He stood trying to remember himself. But his mind was like a night.
Shapes tip-toed through its dark. A hooded figure loomed in his mind. It
swung toward him as if it were flying out of his eyes. Other figures
swept by. They assumed strange postures as they passed. His thoughts
regarded them tiredly. He desired to join the figures fleeing out of
him. Then he would vanish with them.

"I am too clever for that," he murmured aloud. "Yet it would be
pleasing. To think in dark, hooded figures; ah--they have adventures!
And I would sit like a night alive with witches."

He stared with a smile at the street.

"I no longer see or understand," he whispered. His hands felt his sides.

"Yet here I am. There is a life within me that I dare not enter. I must
remember this. Write 'Forbidden' over its black doors. To succumb to my
madness would be to lose it."

He resumed his walk.

"She intruded," he remembered. "Perhaps I have killed her. That would be
pleasant. Except that she was necessary as an image. I am the mirror and
she is an image alive in me. Her desire is a happy shadow I embrace."

Mallare's eyes opened to the night.

"Strange," he thought, "I see and yet what I look at remains invisible.
But tonight outlines dance. The night is a maniac suffering from ennui.
His dark eyes are weary with the emptiness they create. Vainly he
searches for life, his eyes devouring it, and leaving only his own image
for him to contemplate.

"I am not so mad as that. Or I, too, would sit like the night gorged
with monotonous shadows. Instead, I translate. A memory of sanity gives
diverting outline to the shadows in me. I am not a maniac like the
night. My mind closes like a darkness over the world but I enjoy myself
walking amid insane houses, staring at windows that look like drunken
octagons, observing lamp posts that simper with evil, promenading fan
shaped streets that scribble themselves like arithmetic over my face.

"These must be the things I look at. But they are my improvement. The
world is not so outrageous if one