ore, that within him a stern monitor was
making its orders felt and trying to force him to write the message
which was to set the seal of finality upon his next disappearance.

He was facing the utter annihilation of his soul, his personal being,
while his body, dwelt in by his ruthless enemy, should still live on,
seeing the sunshine, breathing the sweet air, loving life. He drew
back, terrified but wrathful, from the brink of this black void to
which his luring desires had led him.

What was it, that gulf of nothingness, into which his soul had plunged
so many times already? Down, down, to what unplumbed depths had it
gone, those other times? True, it had come back. But it had brought no
tidings of that dumb, black vast into which it had sunk. And thinner
and thinner had grown the thread that had drawn it back from that
unsensed abyss until now he knew that it was ready to break. His soul
was numb with the conviction that, let it be thrust once more over
the brink, it would drop beyond recall into oblivion.

It was his own death warrant that this masterful force within him was
ordering him to write--the death warrant of him, Felix Brand, ardent
lover of life and but barely past its beginning, of all of him save
only his fair physical envelope, which would still live and be glad,
though he had passed into nothingness.

Stronger and stronger, the more he resisted, grew this inner
compulsion, until it seemed to have entered into his every nerve and
bone and muscle and he feared to remain at his desk lest it force his
unwilling hand to write. For an hour he loitered about, staying his
steps in other parts of the room, wherever he could make pretense of
busying himself.

But at last, in the late afternoon, he suddenly found himself moving
in the direction of his desk. He stopped, braced himself, took another
step, another, and another, with feet that he could not compel to
cling to the floor. And, after long minutes of struggle, he sank
finally into his desk chair.

But even yet he would not give up. The muscles of his arm bulged, his
neck sinews stood out and his eyes glared red and wrathful in the
effort he was making to be his own master. But slowly, with jerking
movements, impelled by that inexorable force, his hand moved across
the desk, sought to stay itself upon book or inkwell, then, at last
completely overmastered, took pen and wrote--wrote the words sent down
to it by that dominating power that had taken p