nd her heart, as Oliver Crowe ran into the
room through the curtains.

XXXIX

Oliver thought that he had never been quite so sure of anything as
he was that he must be insane. He was insane. Very shortly some heavy
person in uniform would walk into the tidy kitchen where he and Ted were
crouching like moving-picture husbands and remark with a kind smile that
the Ahkoond of Whilom was giving a tea-party in the Mountains of the
Moon that afternoon and that unless Oliver (or, as he was probable
better known) St. Oliver, came back at once in the nice private car
with the wire netting over its windows, everybody from God the Father
Almighty to Carrie Chapman Catt would be highly displeased. For a moment
Oliver thought of lunatic asylums almost lovingly--they had such fine
high walls and smooth green lawns and you were so perfectly safe there
from anything ever happening that was real. Then he jumped--that must be
Mrs. Severance opening the door.

"What are we going to _do_?" he said to Ted in a fierce whisper.

Ted looked at him stupidly. "Do? When I don't know whether I'm on my
feet or my head?" he said. His drugged passiveness showed Oliver with
desolating clarity that anything that could be done would have to be
done by himself. He crept over toward the window with a wild wish that
black magic were included in a Yale curriculum--the only really sensible
thing he could think of doing would be for both of them to vanish
through the wall.

"Look! Fire-escape!"

"What?"

"_Fire-escape_!"

"All right. You take it."

Oliver had been sliding the window up all the while, cursing softly and
horribly at each damnatory creak. Yes--there it was--and people thought
fire-escapes ugly. Personally, Oliver had seldom seen anything in his
life which combined concrete utility with abstract beauty so ideally
as that little flight of iron steps leading down the entry outside the
window into blackness.

"You first, Ted."

"Can't." The word seemed to come despairingly out of the bottom of his
stomach.

"Came here. Own accord. Got to see it through. Take my medicine."

"You fool, she doesn't want you here! Think of Elinor!" For a moment
Oliver thought Ted was going to blaze into more blind rage. Then he
checked himself.

"I am. But listen to that."

The voices that came to them from the living-room were certainly both
high and excited--and the second that Oliver heard one of them he knew
that all his most preposterous