s life out of him.
There was a thin, guttural, sawing noise mixed in with the sobbing. Then
all in a moment the sobbing ceased, he felt the hands relax, and then an
avalanche of darkness crashed down on him, and buried him beneath it.

CHAPTER XXXVI

That game of consequences to which we all sit down, the
hanger-back not least.--R. L. STEVENSON.

Down, very deep down. Buried in an abyss of darkness, shrouded tightly
in a nameless horror that pressed on eyes and breath and hands and
limbs.

At last a faint sound reached Wentworth. Far away in some other world a
clock struck. His numbed faculties apprehended the sound, and then
forgot it when it ceased.

At last he felt himself stir. He found himself staring at a glimmer of
light. He could not look at it, and he could not look away from it. What
was it? It had something to do with him. It grew more distinct. It was a
window with a broken blind.

Someone close at hand began to tremble. Wentworth sat up suddenly and
found it was himself. He was alone, lying crumpled up against the wall
where he had been flung down. He knew where he was. He saw the piles of
tin boxes. He remembered.

He leaned his leaden throbbing head against the wall, and wave after
wave of sickness even unto death shuddered over him. Michael had tried
to kill him. His stiff wrenched throat throbbed together with his head.
For a long time he did not move.

At last the clock struck again.

He staggered to his feet as if he had been called, and looked with
intentness at a fallen book and upset inkstand. There was a quill pen
balancing itself in an absurd manner with its nib stuck in the cane
bottom of an overturned chair. He took it out and laid it on the table.
He saw his hat in a corner, stooped for it, missed it several times, and
then got hold of it, and put it on. There was a little glass over the
mantelpiece. A ghastly face with a torn collar was watching him
furtively through it. He turned fiercely on the spy and found the face
was his own. He turned up his coat and buttoned it. Then he went to the
half-open door and looked out.

His ear caught a faint sound. Otherwise the house was very still.

A maid servant on her knees with her back to him was washing the white
stone floor of the hall at the foot of the staircase. Another servant,
also with her back to him, was watching her.

"Then it is early morning," he said. And he walked out of the room, and
out of the house, t