ation.

The figure of the woman on the couch seemed to move. Instead of the
filmy draperies torn by his own hand, she wore the habiliments of
poverty and looked at him out of a face of plebeian prettiness; a face
of dimly confused features. The apparition rose and stood waveringly
upright. "You murdered me, too!" it said in a voice of vague simplicity.
Eben Tollman tried to scream and could not.

He covered his eyes with his palms, but failed to shut out the image
because it lay deeper than the retina's curtain.

"I'm one of the others you murdered," went on the voice. "I'm Minnie
Ray."

Tollman straightened suddenly up. The vagary had passed--but on the
couch the two immovable figures remained.

Tollman had never been a handsome man, but his face and carriage had
held a certain stiff semblance of dignity. Now his cheeks flamed with
the temperature which must, without the immediate administration of a
powerful sedative, burn out his life with its crisping and charring
virulence. His eyes were no longer human, but transformed into that
kinship with those of wild beasts or red embers that comes with acute
mania.

As the shadows wavered in the room which he had made a place of murder,
there rose out of them taunting, accusing figures. He seemed to see
Hagan, the detective, grotesquely converted into an executioner clad in
red and Sam Haymond launching against him the anathema of the Church.
There were shapes of strange things neither human, animal nor
reptile--but wholly monstrous--emerging greedily from filthy lairs and
creeping toward him with sinuous movements through a sea of slime.

For the furies that haunted Orestes, because of his classic crime, had
come back to pursue Eben Tollman.

He laughed as maniacs laugh and screamed as maniacs scream, until the
strange medley of insensate sounds went rocketing and skittering through
the house and came back in echo, as the retort of the furies.

One human sense was left: the sense of flight: the impulse to leave the
place where Death held dominion and Death's avengers came in unclean and
rapacious hordes.

Turning, he fled with a speed born of his dementia, hurling himself
through the door with a crash of shattered glass and a trail of
incoherent ravings.

Without sense of direction or objective he raced here and there,
doubling like a frightened rabbit, taking no account of paths or
obstructions, seeing nothing but hordes of pursuing furies urged on by a
pars