word the doctor says is law. How would you like me to come again
like this, perhaps?--like Santa Claus?'

'You know how I love having you,' she said, and stopped. 'But--but...'
He leaned closer. 'Yes, yes, come,' she said, clutching his hand and
hiding her eyes; 'it is only my dream--that horrible, dwelling face in
the dream; it frightened me so.'

Lawford rose very slowly from his knees. He could feel in the dark his
brows drawn down; there came a low, sullen beating on his ear; he saw
his face as it were in dim outline against the dark. Rage and rebellion
surged up in him; even his love could be turned to bitterness. Well, two
could play at any game! Alice sprang up in bed and caught his sleeve.
'Dearest, dearest, you must not be angry with me now!'

He flung himself down beside the bed. Anger, resentment died away. 'You
are all I have left,' he said.

He stole back, as he had come, in the clear dawn to his bedroom.

It was not five yet. He put a few more coals on his fire and blew out
the night-light, and lay down. But it was impossible to rest, to remain
inactive. He would go down and search for that first volume of Quain.
Hallucination, Influenza, Insanity--why, Sheila must have purposely
mislaid it. A rather formidable figure he looked, descending the stairs
in the grey dusk of daybreak. The breakfast-room was at the back of
the house. He tilted the blind, and a faint light flowed in from the
changing colours of the sky. He opened the glass door of the little
bookcase to the right of the window, and ran eye and finger over the few
rows of books. But as he stood there with his back to the room, just as
the shadow of a bird's wing floats across the moonlight of a pool, he
became suddenly conscious that something, somebody had passed across the
doorway, and in passing had looked in on him.

He stood motionless, listening; but no sound broke the morning
slumbrousness, except the faraway warbling of a thrush in the first
light. So sudden and transitory had been the experience that it seemed
now to be illusory; yet it had so caught him up, it had with so furtive
and sinister a quietness broken in on his solitude, that for a moment he
dared not move. A cold, indefinite sensation stole over him that he was
being watched; that some dim, evil presence was behind him biding its
time, patient and stealthy, with eyes fixed unmovingly on him where
he stood. But, watch and wait as silently as he might, only the day
broade