him it was no longer causeless; he knew now what he
feared--he feared that he was going mad.

It was the punishment that he had brought upon himself, some fearful
nervous disease, the result of his long indulgence of vice, his vile
submission to the brute that was to destroy his reason; some collapse of
all his faculties, beginning first with that which was highest, most
sensitive--his art--spreading onward and downward till he should have
reached the last stages of idiocy. It was Nature inexorably exacting. It
was the vast fearful engine riding him down beneath its myriad spinning
wheels, remorselessly, irresistibly.

The dreadful calamities that he had brought upon himself recoiled upon
his head, crushing him to the dust with their weight of anguish and
remorse: Ida Wade's suicide, his father's death, his social banishment,
the loss of his art, Hiram Wade's lawsuit menacing him with beggary, and
now this last, this approaching insanity. It was no longer fire driving
out fire; the sense of all these disasters seemed to come back upon him
at once, as keen, as bitter as when they had first befallen. He had told
himself that he did not believe in a hell. Could there be a worse hell
than this?

But all at once, without knowing why, moved by an impulse, a blind,
resistless instinct, Vandover started up in bed, raising his clasped
hands above him, crying out, "Oh, help me! Why don't you _help_ me? You
can if you only will!" Who was it to whom he had cried with such
unerring intuition? He gave no name to this mysterious "You," this
strange supernatural being, this mighty superhuman power. It was the cry
of a soul in torment that does not stop to reason, the wild last hope
that feels its own helplessness, that responds to an intuition of a
force outside of itself--the force that can save it in its time of
peril.

Trembling, his hands still clasped above him, Vandover waited for an
answer, waited for the miracle. In the tortured exalted state of his
nerves he seemed suddenly possessed of a sixth sense; he fancied that he
would know, there in that room, in a few seconds, while yet his hands
remained clasped above his head. It was his last hope: if this failed
him there was nothing left. Still he waited; he felt that he should know
when the miracle came, that he would suddenly be filled with a sense of
peace, of quiet joy. Still he waited--there was nothing, nothing but the
vast silence, the unbroken blackness of the night, a