Jack shook his head until it cleared. He crouched and held out his hands
toward the man, but he did not move his feet. Over and over,
half-chanting, half-crooning, he said, "Mr. Eumenes! The glasses!
Please, Mr. Eumenes, the glasses!"

The forty-nine Mr. Eumenae-and-otherwise looked incuriously with
impenetrable rosy eyes. The fiftieth put the white handkerchief back in
his pocket. His mouth opened. False teeth gleamed. With his free hand he
took off his hat and waved it at the crowd and bowed.

His tilted head showed a white fuzzlike hair that shot up over his pale
scalp. His gestures were both comic and terrifying. The hat and the
inclination of his body said far more than words could. They said,
_Good-by forever, and bon voyage!_

Then Mr. Eumenes straightened up and opened his lids.

At first, the sockets looked as if they held no eyeballs, as if they
were empty of all but shadows.

Jack saw them from a distance. Mr. Eumenes-or-his-twin was shooting away
faster and faster and becoming smaller and smaller. No! He himself was.
He was rocketing away within his own body. He was falling down a deep
well.

He, Jack Crane, was a hollow shaft down which he slipped and screamed,
away, away, from the world outside. It was like seeing from the wrong
end of a pair of binoculars that lengthened and lengthened while the man
with the long-sought-for treasure in his hand flew in the opposite
direction as if he had been connected to the horizon by a rubber band
and somebody had released it and he was flying towards it, away from
Jack.

Even as this happened, as he knew vaguely that his muscles were locking
into the posture of a beggar, hands out, pleading, face twisted into an
agony of asking, lips repeating his croon-chant, he saw what had
occurred.

The realization was like the sudden, blinding, and at the same time
clarifying light that sometimes comes to epileptics just as they are
going into a seizure. It was the thought that he had kept away on the
horizon of his mind, the thought that now charged in on him with long
leaps and bounds and then stopped and sat on its haunches and grinned at
him while its long tongue lolled.

Of course, he should have known all these years what it was. He should
have known that Mr. Eumenes was the worst thing in the world for him. He
had known it, but, like a drug addict, he had refused to admit it. He
had searched for the man. Yet he had known it would be fatal to find
him. The r