ute.

Abruptly out of apathy would come a boiling paroxysm of fury, when
I thought of Nettie mocking me and laughing, and of her and Verrall
clasped in one another's arms.

"I will not have it so!" I screamed. "I will not have it so!"

And in one of these raving fits I drew my revolver from my pocket
and fired into the quiet night. Three times I fired it.

The bullets tore through the air, the startled trees told one another
in diminishing echoes the thing I had done, and then, with a slow
finality, the vast and patient night healed again to calm. My shots,
my curses and blasphemies, my prayers--for anon I prayed--that
Silence took them all.

It was--how can I express it?--a stifled outcry tranquilized,
lost, amid the serene assumptions, the overwhelming empire of that
brightness. The noise of my shots, the impact upon things, had
for the instant been enormous, then it had passed away. I found
myself standing with the revolver held up, astonished, my emotions
penetrated by something I could not understand. Then I looked up
over my shoulder at the great star, and remained staring at it.

"Who are YOU?" I said at last.

I was like a man in a solitary desert who has suddenly heard a voice. . . .

That, too, passed.

As I came over Clayton Crest I recalled that I missed the multitude
that now night after night walked out to stare at the comet, and
the little preacher in the waste beyond the hoardings, who warned
sinners to repent before the Judgment, was not in his usual place.

It was long past midnight, and every one had gone home. But I did
not think of this at first, and the solitude perplexed me and left
a memory behind. The gas-lamps were all extinguished because of the
brightness of the comet, and that too was unfamiliar. The little
newsagent in the still High Street had shut up and gone to bed,
but one belated board had been put out late and forgotten, and it
still bore its placard.

The word upon it--there was but one word upon it in staring
letters--was: "WAR."

You figure that empty mean street, emptily echoing to my footsteps--no
soul awake and audible but me. Then my halt at the placard. And
amidst that sleeping stillness, smeared hastily upon the board,
a little askew and crumpled, but quite distinct beneath that cool
meteoric glare, preposterous and appalling, the measureless evil
of that word--

"WAR!"

Section 2

I awoke in that state of equanimity that so often follows an
emotiona