ng?

Whimperingly, like a dream-dazed dog, the soul of him began to
shiver with fear. Oh, ye gods! If returning consciousness would only
manifest itself first by some one indisputable proof of a still
undisintegrated body, some crisp, reassuring method of outlining
one's corporeal edges, some sensory roll-call, as it were of--head,
hands, feet, sides! But out of oblivion, out of space abysmal, out
of sensory annihilation, to come vaporing back, back, back,--headless,
armless, legless, trunkless, conscious only of consciousness, uncertain
yet whether the full awakening prove itself--this world or the next!
As sacred of Heaven--as--of hell! As--!

Then very, very slowly, with no realization of eyelids, with no
realization of lifting his eyelids, Barton began to see things. And he
thought he was lying on the soft outer edges of a gigantic black
pansy, staring blankly through its glowing golden center into the
droll, sketchy little face of the pansy.

And then suddenly, with a jerk that seemed almost to crack his spine,
he sensed that the blackness wasn't a pansy at all, but just a round,
earthy sort of blackness in which he himself lay mysteriously prone.
And he heard the wind still roaring furiously away off somewhere. And
he heard the rain still drenching and sousing away off somewhere. But
no wind seemed to be tugging directly at him, and no rain seemed to be
splashing directly on him. And instead of the cavernous golden crater
of a supernatural pansy there was just a perfectly tame yellow
farm-lantern balanced adroitly on a low stone in the middle of the
mysterious round blackness.

And in the sallow glow of that pleasant lantern-light little Eve
Edgarton sat cross-legged on the ground with a great pulpy clutter of
rain-soaked magazines spread out all around her like a giant's pack of
cards. And diagonally across her breast from shoulder to waistline her
little gray flannel shirt hung gashed into innumerable ribbons.

To Barton's blinking eyes she looked exceedingly strange and untidy.
But nothing seemed to concern little Eve Edgarton except that
spreading circle of half-drowned papers.

"For Heaven's sake--wha--ght are you--do'?" mumbled Barton.

Out from her flickering aura of yellow lantern-light little Eve
Edgarton peered forth quizzically into Barton's darkness. "Why--I'm
trying to save--my poor dear--books," she drawled.

"Wha--ght?" struggled Barton. The word dragged on his tongue
like a weight of lead