-without so much as
trying the door, just once again, to see if it were still bolted against
her.

She did not care. She was sneaking off--down the stairs--Oh, yes, he
knew where.

His lips began to twitch again and his finger nails scratched on the
bedclothes. If only he had something, some weapon, an axe, a broad,
keen, glittering axe! He would show them! He was strong, incredibly
strong! Five men could not have turned him back from what he was going
to do--if only he had something.

His hand, creeping, groping, closed on the neck of the 'cello leaning by
the bed. He laughed.

Oh, yes, he would stop her from going down there; he would hold her,
just where she was on the dark stair nerveless, breathless, as long as
he liked, if he liked he would bring her back, cringing, begging.

He drew the bow, and laughed higher and louder yet to hear the booming
discord rocking in upon him from the shadows. Swaying from side to side,
he lashed the hollow creature to madness. They came in the press of the
gale, marching, marching, the wild, dark pageant of his fathers, nearer
and nearer through the moon-struck night.

"Tell me _what_?" he laughed. "_What_?"

And abruptly he slept, sprawled crosswise on the covers, half-clothed,
dishevelled, triumphant.

* * * * *

It was not the same night, but another; whether the next or the next but
one, or two, Christopher can not say. But he was out of doors.

He had escaped from the house at dusk; he knew that.

He had run away, through the hedge and down the back side of the hill,
torn between the two, the death, warm and red like life, and the birth,
pale, chill, and inexorable as death.

Most of that daft night-running will always be blank in Christopher's
mind; moments and moments, like islands of clarity, remain. He brings
back one vivid interval when he found himself seated on his father's
gravestone among the whispering grasses, staring down into the pallid
bowl of the world. And in that moment he knew what Daniel Kain had felt,
and Maynard Kain before him; a passionate and contemptuous hatred for
all the dullards in the world who never dreamed dreams or saw visions or
sang wordless songs or ran naked-hearted in the flood of the full-blown
moon. He hated them because they could not by any possibility comprehend
his magnificent separation, his starry sanity, his kinship with the
gods. And he had a new thirst to obliterate the whole creeping