ooked so fearful, so very strange. I put my fingers on her eyelids;
I drew them down over the eyeballs: they did not open again. I felt her
withered hands: they were ice. Then I knew, and I felt myself smiling. I
leaned over the dead woman. There, on the far side of her, crouched the
cat. Its white fur was all bristling; its blue eyes were dilated; on its
jaws there were flecks of foam.

I leaned over the dead woman and took it in my arms.

*****

That was nearly twenty years ago, and yet to-night the memory of that
moment, and what followed it, bring a fear to my heart which I must
combat. I have read of men who lived for long spaces of time haunted
by demons created by their imagination, and I have laughed at them and
pitied them. Surely I am not going to join in their folly, in their
madness, led to the gates of terror by my own fancies, half-confirmed,
apparently, by the chance utterances of a conceited Professor--a man of
fads, although a man of science.

That was twenty years ago. After to-night let me forget it. After
to-night, do I say? Hark! the birds are twittering in the dew outside.
The pale, early sun-shafts strike over the moors. And I am tired.
To-morrow night I will finish this wrestle with my own folly; I will
give the _coup de grace_ to my imagination.. But no more now. My brain
is not calm, and I will not write in excitement.

II.

_Wednesday Night, November 4th_.

Margot has gone to bed at last, and I am alone. This has been a horrible
day--horrible; but I will not dwell upon it.

After the death of my grandmother, I went back to school again. But
Willoughby was gone, and he could not forgive me. He wrote to me once or
twice from New York, and then I ceased to hear from him. He died out of
my life. His affection for me had evidently declined from the day when
he took it into his head that I was only a money-grubber, like the
rest of the world, and that the Jew instinct had developed in me at an
abnormally early age. I let him go. What did it matter? But I was always
glad that I had been cruel on the day my grandmother died. I never
repented of what I did--never. If I had, I might be happier now.

I went back to school. I studied, played, got into mischief and out of
it again, like other boys; but in my life there seemed to be an eternal
coldness, that I alone, perhaps, was conscious of. My deed of cruelty,
of brutal revenge on the thing that had never done me injury, had
seared my so