Till Friday at seven, then."

Regaining the street, Presley sent his valise to his club (where he had
engaged a room) by a messenger boy, and boarded a Castro Street car.
Before leaving Bonneville, he had ascertained, by strenuous enquiry,
Mrs. Hooven's address in the city, and thitherward he now directed his
steps.

When Presley had told Cedarquist that he was ill, that he was jaded,
worn out, he had only told half the truth. Exhausted he was, nerveless,
weak, but this apathy was still invaded from time to time with fierce
incursions of a spirit of unrest and revolt, reactions, momentary
returns of the blind, undirected energy that at one time had prompted
him to a vast desire to acquit himself of some terrible deed of
readjustment, just what, he could not say, some terrifying martyrdom,
some awe-inspiring immolation, consummate, incisive, conclusive. He
fancied himself to be fired with the purblind, mistaken heroism of the
anarchist, hurling his victim to destruction with full knowledge that
the catastrophe shall sweep him also into the vortex it creates.

But his constitutional irresoluteness obstructed his path continually;
brain-sick, weak of will, emotional, timid even, he temporised,
procrastinated, brooded; came to decisions in the dark hours of the
night, only to abandon them in the morning.

Once only he had ACTED. And at this moment, as he was carried through
the windy, squalid streets, he trembled at the remembrance of it. The
horror of "what might have been" incompatible with the vengeance
whose minister he fancied he was, oppressed him. The scene perpetually
reconstructed itself in his imagination. He saw himself under the shade
of the encompassing trees and shrubbery, creeping on his belly toward
the house, in the suburbs of Bonneville, watching his chances, seizing
opportunities, spying upon the lighted windows where the raised curtains
afforded a view of the interior. Then had come the appearance in the
glare of the gas of the figure of the man for whom he waited. He saw
himself rise and run forward. He remembered the feel and weight in his
hand of Caraher's bomb--the six inches of plugged gas pipe. His upraised
arm shot forward. There was a shiver of smashed window-panes, then--a
void--a red whirl of confusion, the air rent, the ground rocking,
himself flung headlong, flung off the spinning circumference of things
out into a place of terror and vacancy and darkness. And then after a
long time the r