From where did they arrive? They could not be the moths he liberated. But.... _Were they?_ Had some accident robbed their bodies of the tissue missives? Had they blundered into somebody’s room and been robbed? Mystified, uneasy, he hung over his window sill, staring with sickening eyes at the winged tumult below. With patient, plodding logic he began to seek for the solution. What attracted these moths to the room below? Was it the candle-light? That alone could not be sufficient--could not contend with the more imperious attraction, the subtle effluvia stealing out of the north and appealing to the ruling passion which animated the frantic winged things below him. Patiently, methodically in his mind he probed about for some clue to the solution. The ruling passion animating the feathery whirlwind below was the necessity for mating and perpetuating the species. That was the dominant passion; the lure of candle-light a secondary attraction.... Then, if this were so--and it had been proven to be a fact--then--then--_what_ was in that young girl’s bedroom just below him? Even as the question flashed in his mind he left the window, went to his door, listened, noiselessly unlocked it. A low murmur of voices came from the café. He drew off both shoes, descended the stairs on the flat pads of his large, bony feet, listening all the while. Candle-light streamed out into the corridor from her open bedroom door; and he crept to the sill and peered in, searching the place with small, pale eyes. At first he noticed nothing to interest him, then, all in an instant, his gaze fell upon Madam Death under her prison of glass. There she sat, her great bulging abdomen distended with eggs, her lambent eyes shining with the terrible passion of anticipation. For one thing only she had been created. That accomplished she died. And there she crouched awaiting the fulfillment of her life’s cycle with the blazing eyes of a demon. ------------------ From the café below came the cautious murmur of voices. The young man already knew what they were whispering about; or, if he did not know he no longer cared. The patches of bright colour in his sunken cheeks had died out in an ashen pallor. As far as he was concerned the world was now ended. And he knew it. He went into the bedroom and sat down on the bed’s edge. His little, pale eyes wandered about the white room; the murmur of voices below was audible all the while. After a few moments’ patient waiting, his gaze rested again on Madam Death, squatting there with wings sloped, and the skull and bones staring at him from her head and distended abdomen. After all there was an odd resemblance between himself and Madam Death. He had been born to fulfill one function, it appeared. So had she. And now, in his case as in hers, death was immediately to follow. This was sentiment, not science--the blind lobe of the German brain balancing grotesquely the reasoning lobe.