e felt, could be escaped
only in death.

This was appalling. I lived through many years of the horror, but I fell
off the world at last on to another planet, where there came a period of
peace.

When I waked up I was looking at my hands.

To my great surprise they were no longer brown and strong as a young man's
hands ought to be, but of a sickly white, and so thin that I found myself
laughing at them in a slow, soft way, as one laughs in one's sleep.

At first it did not seem to matter that I should have hands like that; but
suddenly, with a rush of blood to the heart, I realized that it was
unnatural, dreadful, that something hideous must have happened to me.

In a moment my head was clear, and I felt as if a tight band had been
taken off my forehead.

Yes, something had happened, but what?

I looked round and saw a room unfamiliar, yet already hated. It was a
small, but beautiful room, the walls covered with Moorish work, such as I
had seen at the Alhambra. I lay on a divan-bed, in an alcove without
windows; but in the room beyond, I saw one with a dainty filigree frame,
supported by a marble pillar. There was also an archway, from which a
curtain was pushed aside, and I could see the end of a marble bath.

How had I come to this place? Where was it, and how long had I been there?
were the next questions I asked myself.

There was no more dreaming now. The room was real; and the whiteness and
emaciation of my hands were real. A man must have been very ill, and for a
long time, to have hands as white and thin as that.

Suddenly I sat up, crying aloud, "Monica!"

The sound of her name brought her image before me. What horrible thing had
been done to me that I should have forgotten her very existence?

Strength failed, and I fell back, a dampness coming out on my forehead.
Above all, what had been done to her? "Don't leave me alone," she had
begged; yet I had deserted her. I was--here.

The motoring days came back to me; happy, hopeful days in the open air.
How long ago were they that I should be thus broken, that I should feel
like a man grown old?

Slowly, and cold as the trail of a snake, a thought crawled into my mind.

I remembered a short story I had read once. It was by Gertrude Atherton,
and at the time I had thought it the most harrowing story ever written. A
woman had gone to sleep, young, beautiful, beloved. She had waked to find
her hair grey, her hands old and veined. Twenty blank years