ed to."

"Is she pretty?"

"Oh, tall and dark, don't you know. Not at all my style."

But now night had swallowed Annandale. Loftus and Marie passed on.

CHAPTER VI

THE YELLOW FAY

At noon the next day Annandale was not awake nor was he asleep.
Through spaces in which memories met, entangled and sank, he was
groping in search of himself. In these spaces there were things, some
formless, others half-formed, that got between consciousness and
interfered with the search.

These things pulled at him, tripped him, shoved him down to the
memories that were sinking below. The spaces themselves were very
dark. But, in the deeper depths, where memories swooned, the darkness
was punctuated by slender flames the size of pins. They burned him.

Up and away he tried to rise. When he nearly succeeded, the things
above, the things half-formed and formless that were waiting there,
pushed him back. Again he tried. But the darkness was thick, the
depths were thunderous, the things above pounded on his head, the thin
flames lapped at him.

A force took and lifted him high, very high, and suddenly dropped him.
In the abrupt descent he clutched at the things, but he was whirled
through them to receding plains and up again, higher, still higher.
There a ray filtered, in the light of which a memory staggered. He saw
himself drinking in the rooms of that girl of Loftus. From there he
passed into blankness at the end of which stood Sylvia, her face white
and drawn. The vision vanished. Then it seemed to him that he was
drinking with a fat man who had prominent teeth which he took from his
mouth and changed into dice. But where? In hell, perhaps. Annandale
was uncertain. He knew merely that he had been beastly drunk and that
his head was simply splitting.

It continued to split. Hours later, sedatives and his servant aiding,
the splitting ceased. But the blanks did not fill and though behind
them he could not look, yet the subconscious self that registers and
retains everything we do and hear and say prompted him dumbly that
behind the blanks there lurked the dismal and, perhaps, the dire.

This foreboding he attributed to his nerves. As a matter of fact they
were rather shaky. But inaction was intolerable. He tried to write a
note to Sylvia, but his hand was insufficiently steady. Failing in
that he told Harris to get some flowers, take them to Miss Waldron,
and say that he would call that evening. When later the man retu