from the thoughts that had been hounding him all day.

He made up his mind to read a little before going to bed, and all at
once remembered a book that he had once begun a long time ago but had
never finished: the story of two men who had bought a wrecked opium ship
for fifty thousand dollars and had afterward discovered that she
contained only a few tins of the drug. He had never read on to find how
that story turned out. Suddenly he found himself repeating, "Twenty-five
thousand dollars, twenty-five thousand dollars--where will _I_ find
twenty-five thousand dollars?" He wondered if he would go to jail if he
failed to pay. His interest in the book was gone in a moment, and he
took up another of his favourite novels, the story of a boy at the time
of Christ, a Jewish boy unjustly condemned to the galleys, liberated
afterward, and devoting his life to the overthrow of his enemy, whom at
last he overcame and humbled, fouling him in a chariot race, all but
killing him.

He sat down in the huge leather chair, and, drawing it up to the piano
lamp and cocking his feet upon the table, began to read. In a few
moments the same numbness stole into his head like a rising fog, a
queer, tense feeling, growing at the back of his forehead and at the
base of his skull, a dulness, a strange stupefying sensation as of some
torpid, murky atmosphere. He looked about him quickly; all the objects
in the range of his vision--the corner of the desk, the corduroy couch,
the low bookcase with Flossie's yellow slipper and Barye's lioness upon
it--seemed to move back and stand upon the same plane; the objects
themselves appeared immovable enough, but the sensation of them in his
brain somewhere behind his eyes began to move about in a slow, dizzy
whirl. The old touch of unreasoning terror came back, together with a
sudden terror of the spirit, a sickening sinking of the heart, a
loathing of life, terrible beyond words.

Vandover started up, striving to keep himself in hand, fighting against
a wild desire to rush about from wall to wall, shrieking and waving his
arms. Over and over again he exclaimed, "Oh, _what_ is the matter with
me?" The strangeness of the thing was what unsettled and unnerved him.
He had all the sensations of terror, but without any assignable reason,
and this groundless fear became in the end the cause of a new fear: he
was afraid of this fear that was afraid of nothing.

Very gradually, however, the crisis passed away. He