"That also is inconsistent." "No, I don't think so. It takes longer than you would imagine to do all the housework yourself. I tried it last winter and found it not worth while. Besides, dusting and cleaning are so absorbing. I could think of nothing else." "But doesn't she find it absorbing?" Merivale laughed. "I feel sure she doesn't," he said, "or she would do it better. But when I dusted for myself, nothing short of perfection would content me. I was dusting all day long." Evelyn looked doubtfully at his bed. "Shall I have to make it--whatever 'making' means?" he asked, "if I sleep in it? If so, I really don't think it would be worth while. Besides, I know I shan't sleep, and if I don't sleep I am a wreck." Merivale raised his eyebrows. "Surely you sleep when you want sleep just as you eat when you are hungry," he said, "or is that an exploded superstition?" "Quite exploded. I shan't sleep a wink," said Evelyn, beginning to undress. "Oh, how can I?" he cried. "And you really want to?" "Why, of course. I'm as cross as two sticks if I don't." Merivale shook his head. "I'll make you sleep if you wish," he said. "Get into bed. I must go and turn out the lights. I'll be back in two minutes." He left the room, and Evelyn undressed quickly. All that had happened to-day ran like a mill-race in his head, and, arguing from previous experience, he knew perhaps the tithe of what awaited him when the light was out. For often before, when a picture, not as now the original of it, occupied him, misshapen parodies of rest had been his till cock-crow. First of all would come a sense of satisfaction at being alone, at being able to let his thoughts take their natural course uninterrupted; he would feast his eyes on the untenanted blackness, letting his imagination paint there all that it had been so intensely occupied with during the day. But then as the brain wearied, in place of the ideal he had been striving for would come distorted reflections of it, seen as if in some bloated mirror, and still awake he would see his thoughts translated into some horrible grotesque that would startle him into sitting-up in bed, just for the grasping of the bed-post, or the feeling of the wall, to bring himself back into the realm of concrete things. Otherwise the grotesques would grow into dancing, shapeless horrors, and in a moment he would have to wrench himself free from the clutches of nightmare and start up, with dripping brow and quivering throat that could not scream, into reality again. But to-night he feared no nightmare; he knew simply that sleep could not come to him, his excitement had invaded and conquered the drowsy lands, and though he felt now that he would be content to think and think and love till morning, morning, he knew, would, like an obsequious waiter, present the bill for the sleepless night. Consequently, when Merivale again entered, he welcomed him.