gas-lit stairs pursued by a gigantic shadow cast by the flickering of a flame turned economically low.
His room lay at the end of the top floor passage beyond the antiquated bathroom with its tin tub. Once inside, he bolted the door and flung himself down on the blankets of his bed to weep. A light, brilliant but far away, cast the crooked outline of an ailanthus tree against the faded greasy paper of the room. A cat, lean and adventurous, moved across the sill, and a cat fifty times its size moved in concert across the wall at the foot of the bed. Amid the faint odors of onions and dust, Mr. Wyck wept pitifully, silently.
For a long time he lay thus, tormented by memories of what he had seen . . . the crowd cheering and applauding, the woman in crimson and diamonds (an evil creature, symbol of all the cruelties which oppressed him). There were memories too that went back to the days at the Babylon Arms before she had come out of the west to destroy everything, days when Clarence, succumbing to the glamour of a name, had treated him as if he were human . . . days which had marked the peak of happiness. Since then everything had been a decline, a slipping downward slowly into a harsh world where there was no place for him. . . .
After a time, he grew more calm and lay with the quiet of a dead man, staring at the shadows on the wall until at last he raised himself and sat on the edge of the bed, holding his head in his thin hands. It was midnight . . . (a clock somewhere in the distance among all those lights sounded the hour slowly) . . . when he again stirred and, taking up from the bed an old newspaper, set himself to tearing it slowly into strips. He worked with all the concentration of a man hypnotized, until at last the whole thing had been torn into bits. Then he went to the winddow and with great care stuffed each tiny crevice in the rattling frame. In the same fashion he sealed the cracks about the sagging door. And when he had done this he approached the jet on which he was accustomed to heat the milk which made him sleep. But to-night the bottle of milk was left in its corner, un-
