nd accepting life in its
plain naturalness.

Then as sleep deepened the dream changed, becoming hyperbolical and
fantastic, until he saw himself descending into hell. The numerous
women he had betrayed awaited him and pursued him with blazing lamps
of intense and blinding electric fire. And he fled from the light,
seeking darkness like some nocturnal animal. His head was leaned
slightly on one side, the thin, weary face lying in the shadow of the
chair, and the hair that fell thickly on the moist forehead. As he
dreamed the sky grew ghastly as the dead. The night crouched as if in
terror along the edges of the river, beneath the bridges and among
the masonry and the barges aground, and in the ebbing water a lurid
reflection trailed ominously. And as the day ascended, the lamps
dwindled from red to white, and beyond the dark night of the river,
spires appeared upon faint roseate gray.

Then, as the sparrows commenced their shrilling in the garden,
another veil was lifted, and angles and shapes on the warehouses
appeared, and boats laden with newly-cut planks; then the lights that
seemed to lead along the river turned short over the iron girders,
and in white whiffs a train sped across the bridge. The clouds lifted
and cleared away, changing from dark gray to undecided purple, and in
the blank silver of the east, the spaces flushed, and the dawn
appeared in her first veil of rose. And as if the light had
penetrated and moved the brain, the lips murmured--

"False fascination in which we are blinded. Night! shelter and save
me from the day, and in thy opiate arms bear me across the world."

He turned uneasily as if he were about to awake, and then his eyes
opened and he gazed on the spectral pallor of the dawn in the
windows, his brain rousing from dreams slowly into comprehension of
the change that had come. Then collecting his thoughts he rose and
stood facing the dawn. He stood for a moment like one in combat, and
then like one overwhelmed retreated through the folding doors,
seeking his pistol.

"Another day begun! Twelve more hours of consciousness and horror! I
must go!"

* * * * * *

None had heard the report of the pistol, and while the pomp of gold
and crimson faded, and the sun rose into the blueness of morning,
Mike lay still grasping the revolver, the blood flowing down his
face, where he had fallen across the low bed, raised upon lions'
claws and hung with heavy c