inate! Obstinate! Obstinate!"

Lloyd put away the hypodermic syringe and the minim-glass in their
places in the bag, added a little ice-pick to its contents, and shut the
bag with a snap.

"Now," she announced, "I'm ready."

When Miss Douglass had taken herself away Lloyd settled herself in the
place she had vacated, and, stripping the wrappings from the books and
magazines she had bought, began to turn the pages, looking at the
pictures. But her interest flagged. She tried to read, but soon cast the
book from her and leaned back upon the great couch, her hands clasped
behind the great bronze-red coils at the back of her head, her dull-blue
eyes fixed and vacant.

For hours the preceding night she had lain broad awake in her bed,
staring at the shifting shadow pictures that the electric lights,
shining through the trees down in the square, threw upon the walls and
ceiling of her room. She had eaten but little since morning; a growing
spirit of unrest had possessed her for the last two days. Now it had
reached a head. She could no longer put her thoughts from her.

It had all come back again for the fiftieth time, for the hundredth
time, the old, intolerable burden of anxiety growing heavier month by
month, year by year. It seemed to her that a shape of terror, formless,
intangible, and invisible, was always by her, now withdrawing, now
advancing, but always there; there close at hand in some dark corner
where she could not see, ready at every instant to assume a terrible and
all too well-known form, and to jump at her from behind, from out the
dark, and to clutch her throat with cold fingers. The thing played with
her, tormented her; at times it all but disappeared; at times she
believed she had fought it from her for good, and then she would wake of
a night, in the stillness and in the dark, and know it to be there once
more--at her bedside--at her back--at her throat--till her heart went
wild with fear, and the suspense of waiting for an Enemy that would not
strike, but that lurked and leered in dark corners, wrung from her a
suppressed cry of anguish and exasperation, and drove her from her sleep
with streaming eyes and tight-shut hands and wordless prayers.

For a few moments Lloyd lay back upon the couch, then regained her feet
with a brusque, harassed movement of head and shoulders.

"Ah, no," she exclaimed under her breath, "it is too dreadful."

She tried to find diversion in her room, rearranging the fe