he tree, and that's my little girl in pink on the far court. But
I'll take you to your room, and you can see 'em all later."

He led me through a wide parquet-floored hall furnished in pale lemon,
with huge Cloisonnee vases, an ebonized and gold grand piano, and banks
of pot flowers in Benares brass bowls, up a pale oak staircase to a
spacious landing, where there was a green velvet settee trimmed with
silver. The blinds were down, and the light lay in parallel lines on the
floors.

He showed me my room, saying cheerfully: "You may be a little tired. One
often is without knowing it after a run through traffic. Don't come down
till you feel quite restored. We shall all be in the garden."

My room was rather warm, and smelt of perfumed soap. I threw up the
window at once, but it opened so close to the floor and worked so
clumsily that I came within an ace of pitching out, where I should
certainly have ruined a rather lop-sided laburnum below. As I set about
washing off the journey's dust, I began to feel a little tired. But, I
reflected, I had not come down here in this weather and among these new
surroundings to be depressed; so I began to whistle.

And it was just then that I was aware of a little grey shadow, as it
might have been a snowflake seen against the light, floating at an
immense distance in the background of my brain. It annoyed me, and I
shook my head to get rid of it. Then my brain telegraphed that it was
the forerunner of a swift-striding gloom which there was yet time to
escape if I would force my thoughts away from it, as a man leaping for
life forces his body forward and away from the fall of a wall. But the
gloom overtook me before I could take in the meaning of the message. I
moved toward the bed, every nerve already aching with the foreknowledge
of the pain that was to be dealt it, and sat down, while my amazed and
angry soul dropped, gulf by gulf, into that horror of great darkness
which is spoken of in the Bible, and which, as auctioneers say, must be
experienced to be appreciated.

Despair upon despair, misery upon misery, fear after fear, each causing
their distinct and separate woe, packed in upon me for an unrecorded
length of time, until at last they blurred together, and I heard a click
in my brain like the click in the ear when one descends in a diving
bell, and I knew that the pressures were equalised within and without,
and that, for the moment, the worst was at an end. But I knew also