At this moment the curtain rings clicked sharply under the sweep of an impetuous arm, and with the suddenness of an apparition, Marien stood just across the table from him. Her face was highly colored, but the preternatural brightness of the eyes had begun to dull, and there was a loose look, too, about the mouth, the lips of which were curled by a mocking smile. "Well, John Hampstead!" she sneered, with a vindictive look in her eyes, insinuating scorn in her tones. "Now that I have played out the scene, do you think you understand?" John had risen stiffly, every fiber of him in riot at the horror he had heard and was now seeing; but his self-control was perfect, and a kind of dignity invested him for the moment. "Yes," he said, meeting her gaze unflinchingly, "I understand!" The tone of finality that went into this latter word was unescapable. As it was uttered, Marien attempted one of her lightning changes of manner but failed, breaking instead into a fit of hysterical laughter, during which, with head thrown back, her body swayed, and she disappeared behind the curtain, where the laughter ended abruptly in something like a choke, or a fit of coughing. But John’s indignation and disgust were so great that he did not concern himself as to whether Miss Dounay’s laughter might be choking her or not. Embarrassed, too, by the number of eyes turned curiously upon him from the nearer tables where the diners had observed the incident without gathering any of its purport, his only impulse was to pay his bill and escape, before the building and the world came clattering down upon him. *CHAPTER XIV* *THE METHOD OF A DREAM* So paralyzing to a man of Hampstead’s sensitive nature was the effect of Marien Dounay’s startling disclosure that he experienced a partial arrest of consciousness, the symptoms of which hung on surprisingly. Somehow that night he got back to Oakland, and the next morning was again about his work; but the days went by mechanically—days of risings and retirings, eatings and sleepings, memorizing of lines, mumbling of speeches, sliding into clothes, slipping into grease paint, walkings on and walkings off. Through all of these daily obligations the man moved with a certain absent-minded precision, like a person with a split consciousness, who does not let his right lobe know what his left lobe is thinking. He knew, for instance, that a telegram came to him one day with the charges collect, and that he paid the charges and signed for the message, but he did not know that the message lay unopened on his dresser while he spent all his unoccupied time sunk in a stupor of meditation upon the thing which had befallen him.