His intuition, springing from that complaint vaguely known as metaphysical, changed his skin to a subtle frost and laid its squeezing pressure upon his eyes. The quick and heavy beat of his heart became frantically audible to his ears, like a gauntly terrifying horseman riding over him, and his mind changed to a loud confusion. He jumped across the aisle, tore the paper from the gaping man, and read that the woman whom he loved had instantly died after an accident. Assailed by an oblique rain of black claws, he tottered from the car, leaving his valises in the aisle. The black claws vanished; his heart and mind became extinct; and nothing remained save a body turned to ice and guided by instinct. Slowly, and with a brittle indecision in each step, he walked through the bickering brightness of one street after another, hearing and seeing nothing. He reached the bold flatness of the stone apartment building; read the delayed telegram held out by his mother, with the barest shiver of returning life, and dropped upon his bed. Sunlight stood within the small room, like an emaciated patriarch entering through grey shades. Sunlight ignored the glossy chastities of furniture and dull yellow walls, and looked intently at the bed standing in one corner of the room. A long human collapse in black clothes stuck to the white bedspread. A blotch of blonde hair rested stilly in the weak light and hinted of a face. The body shook now and then as though an inquisitively alien hand were investigating its lifelessness. Then sobs pushed their way from the hidden face--an irregular orgy of distorted lyricism. It was as though a martyr were licking up the blood on his wounds and spitting it out in long gurgles of lunatic delight. The sobs were separated by rattling pauses that reminded one of a still living skeleton endlessly wrestling with death. The skeleton and the martyr sometimes felicitated each other upon their endurance, and short silences, like uneasy lies, glided from the hidden face. Then the bleeding turmoil once more streamed upon the air of the room, almost extinguishing the dim sunlight.