ust fancying
things. Suppose there were a back way from Marat's bath-room, and
instead of the soldier Marat came out of his bath, with his wet towels
stained with blood, and dabbed them against your neck."

When next the gallery was empty he crept out. Not because he was
nervous, he told himself, but because one might be, and because the
passage was draughty, and he meant to sleep.

He went down the steps into the Catacombs, and here he spoke the truth
to himself.

"Hang it all!" he said, "I _was_ nervous. That fool Edward must have
infected me. Mesmeric influences, or something."

"Chuck it and go home," said Commonsense.

"I'm damned if I do!" said Vincent.

There were a good many people in the Catacombs at the moment--live
people. He sucked confidence from their nearness, and went up and down
looking for a hiding-place.

Through rock-hewn arches he saw a burial scene--a corpse on a bier
surrounded by mourners; a great pillar cut off half the still, lying
figure. It was all still and unemotional as a Sunday School oleograph.
He waited till no one was near, then slipped quickly through the
mourning group and hid behind the pillar. Surprising--heartening too--to
find a plain rushed chair there, doubtless set for the resting of tired
officials. He sat down in it, comforted his hand with the commonplace
lines of its rungs and back. A shrouded waxen figure just behind him to
the left of his pillar worried him a little, but the corpse left him
unmoved as itself. A far better place this than that draughty passage
where the soldier with legs kept intruding on the darkness that is
always behind one.

Custodians went along the passages issuing orders. A stillness fell.
Then suddenly all the lights went out.

"That's all right," said Vincent, and composed himself to sleep.

But he seemed to have forgotten what sleep was like. He firmly fixed his
thoughts on pleasant things--the sale of his picture, dances with Rose,
merry evenings with Edward and the others. But the thoughts rushed by
him like motes in sunbeams--he could not hold a single one of them, and
presently it seemed that he had thought of every pleasant thing that had
ever happened to him, and that now, if he thought at all, he must think
of the things one wants most to forget. And there would be time in this
long night to think much of many things. But now he found that he could
no longer think.

The draped effigy just behind him worried him again. He had