the treeless empty street, and the rain starring the puddles under the
gas-lamp, but he would wait a little while.

He tried to think why, in spite of all his resolutions, a dark horror
seemed to brood more and more over all his mind. How often he had sat and
worked on just such nights as this, contented if the words were in accord
though the wind might wail, though the air were black with rain. Even
about the little book that he had made there seemed some taint, some
shuddering memory that came to him across the gulf of forgetfulness.
Somehow the remembrance of the offering to Venus, of the phrases that he
had so lovingly invented, brought back again the dusky figures that
danced in the orgy, beneath the brassy glittering lamps; and again the
naphtha flares showed the way to the sad house in the fields, and the red
glare lit up the mildewed walls and the black hopeless windows. He gasped
for breath, he seemed to inhale a heavy air that reeked of decay and
rottenness, and the odor of the clay was in his nostrils.

That unknown cloud that had darkened his thoughts grew blacker and
engulfed him, despair was heavy upon him, his heart fainted with a
horrible dread. In a moment, it seemed, a veil would be drawn away and
certain awful things would appear.

He strove to rise from his chair, to cry out, but he could not. Deep,
deep the darkness closed upon him, and the storm sounded far away. The
Roman fort surged up, terrific, and he saw the writhing boughs in a ring,
and behind them a glow and heat of fire. There were hideous shapes that
swarmed in the thicket of the oaks; they called and beckoned to him, and
rose into the air, into the flame that was smitten from heaven about the
walls. And amongst them was the form of the beloved, but jets of flame
issued from her breasts, and beside her was a horrible old woman, naked;
and they, too, summoned him to mount the hill.

He heard Dr. Burrows whispering of the strange things that had been found
in old Mrs. Gibbon's cottage, obscene figures, and unknown contrivances.
She was a witch, he said, and the mistress of witches.

He fought against the nightmare, against the illusion that bewildered
him. All his life, he thought, had been an evil dream, and for the common
world he had fashioned an unreal red garment, that burned in his eyes.
Truth and the dream were so mingled that now he could not divide one from
the other. He had let Annie drink his soul beneath the hill, on the ni