tary
presence through many a long evening. July came with blistering breath,
and he took to the Adirondacks, meaning to be gone a month. Within ten
days he was home again, drawn back irresistibly by that strange
insatiable craving of unformulated desire. Town bored him, yet he could
not seem to rest away from it.

He wandered in and out, up and down, an unquiet, irresolute soul,
tremendously perplexed....

There came one dark and sultry night, heavy beneath skies overcast, in
August. Whitaker left a roof-garden in the middle of a stupid
performance, and walked the streets till long after midnight, courting
the fatigue that alone could bestow untroubled sleep. On his return, a
sleepy hall-boy with a wilted collar ran the elevator up to his
tenth-floor landing and, leaving him fumbling at the lock of his door,
dropped clankingly out of sight. Whitaker entered and shut himself in
with the pitch-blackness of his private hall.

He groped along the wall for the electric switch, and found only the
shank of it--the hard-rubber button having disappeared. And then, while
still he was trying to think how this could have happened, he sustained
a murderous assault.

A miscalculation on the part of the marauder alone saved him. The
black-jack (or whatever the weapon was) missing his head by the
narrowest shave, descended upon his left shoulder with numbing force.
Notwithstanding his pain and surprise, Whitaker rallied and grappled,
thus escaping a second and possibly more deadly blow.

But his shoulder was almost useless, and the pain of it began to sicken
him, while the man in his grip fought like a devil unchained. He found
himself wedged back into a corner, brutal fingers digging deep into the
flesh round his windpipe. He fought desperately to escape strangulation.
Eventually he struggled out of the corner and gave ground through the
doorway into his sitting-room.

For some minutes the night in that quiet room, high above the city, was
rendered wild and violent with the crashes of overthrown furniture and
the thud and thump of struggling bodies. Then by some accident little
short of miraculous, Whitaker broke free and plunged across the room in
what he imagined to be the direction of a dresser in which he kept a
revolver. His foot slipped on the hardwood floor, the ankle twisted, and
he fell awkwardly, striking his head against a table-leg with such force
that he lay half-stunned. An instant later his assailant emptied five