lked to his chair again, sat tensely down, and faced the long
room and his childish terror at its emptiness.

Innocent as had been his impulse toward Maurice's and full as was
Broadway with places as glittering and noisy, his morbid duty to debar
that one resort seemed to him to condemn him to the house for the night.
Why was it the butler's night out? Even to know that he was below
stairs--Would other nights be like this? _Every_ night--The possibility
turned him cold. His thoughts were racing now, and even as he gripped
the arms of the chair a still worse terror gripped his mind. His
loneliness seemed to have become an actual thing, real as a person, a
spirit haunting the luxurious, silent house. He was facing the door, and
its heavy mahogany, fixing his attention through his staring gaze,
seemed to be shutting him alone with the dead. Save for his trembling
self and his wife's painted eyes, the big room was lifeless. It was
beyond the closed door that his imagination, now running beyond control,
pictured the presence of his frightful guest--his own solitude, coming
in ironical answer to his craving for companionship.

Were those live eyes of the dead creating his sense of an impending life
in the house? Was it his wife, who, never having created a child for
him, was forcing on him now a horrible companion? Again he started
desperately toward the picture, again he caught himself, again he cried,
"My God!" and faced his terror passionately, facing too, this time, the
closed door.

"You fool! You fool!"

His voice sounded weak and strange to him as if indeed some one else had
spoken. The paralyzing thought that such a mood of panic could be the
beginning of real madness had shaken his voice and his whole body, and
again Maurice's, now as a positive savior, rushed into his mind. But he
threw the idea of refuge contemptuously away. He would stand his ground
and not leave the house that night; yet even as he stood, he asked
himself if this was not because he feared to open the door.

With a gasp, he drew himself up in the center of the room, and in a
surge of determined anger, with his eyes on the door, facing it as he
would have faced an enemy before he attacked, he deliberately gave his
mind to his fear, letting it sweep through him, trying to magnify it,
reading every horror that he could into the imagined presence that he
intended to dispel, and then, tormenting himself with slow steps, he
walked to the door, reac