d taste in
tobacco. Whatever you do, never allow your supplies to run low, or
you'll straightway lose a good half of your social pull. Good night."
And, with a nod to Ramsdell, he was gone.

Opdyke was not asleep within an hour. Moreover, although Ramsdell did
know what to do, and did it, the stroke of midnight found him still
staring at the dark with burning eyes, while the pillowcase underneath
his head hissed faintly to the steady throbbing of his temples. The
noxious, deadly poison of Mrs. Brenton's talk had made its insidious
way through and through his system, loosening its carefully maintained
tensions, overthrowing its balances, stirring up all the old, forgotten
dregs of rebellious restlessness and turning them into his blood. It
mattered nothing that Reed Opdyke recognized the fact that it was
poison, mattered nothing that he despised it and fought against it with
every antidote within his reach. The harm was done; it would take long
and long to undo it, to bring him back to his old mental health once
more.

Across the darkness, his life seemed to him to be marching,
pageant-wise, a series of separated scenes. They started, according to
his idea, in the faint shaft of light that crept in to him through
Ramsdell's keyhole--for, despite all orders, the faithful fellow had
flatly refused to put himself into bed until Opdyke himself should be
snoring. They started, each one of them, in the narrow thread of light;
they marched slowly across the blackness of the ceiling above his head,
and then they ranged themselves along the opposite wall, and lurked
there in the shadow, leering at him. In each one of them, moreover, he
held the very centre of the stage.

He saw himself a student, loitering about the elm-arched campus,
lounging above a table in the smoke-thick air of Mory's, sitting in
Professor Mansfield's study and gravely discussing with him the
possibilities included in Scott Brenton. He saw himself in his
professional school, star of his class, pampered godling of his mates.
He saw himself, his fists in his pockets and his nose to the tanging
breeze, striding along the Colorado mountain sides, saw himself,
lightly poised on any sort of a contrivance that could swing from a
rope's end, going down into the darkness of the mine. Then he saw
himself--and, as he looked, his eyes were steady--scrambling over the
heaps of wreckage towards the stark form beyond.

And then he saw himself the centre of a group of