_... that last Wild pageant of the accumulated past That clangs and flashes for a drowning man._ I saw Susan shutting the door of a delicately panelled Georgian room, and every detail of this room--a room I had never entered in the flesh--was distinct to me. Given time, I could have inventoried its every object. I saw Gertrude lying on--not a couch, as Conlon had called it--on a _chaise-longue_, a book with a vivid green cover in her left hand, a bronze paper knife with a thin, pointed blade in her right. She was holding it with the knuckles of her hand upward, her thumb along the handle, and the point of the blade turned to her left, across and a little in toward her body. She was wearing a very lovely _négligé_, a true creation, all in filmy tones of old gold. On a low-set tip-table at her elbow stood a reading-lamp, and a small coal-black French bull lay asleep on a superb Chinese rug--lay close in by the _chaise-longue_, just where a dropped hand might caress him. A light silky-looking coverlet of a peculiar dull blue, harmonizing with certain tones of the rug, was thrown across Gertrude's feet. As Susan shut the door, the little bull pricked up his bat-ears and started to uncurl, but Gertrude must have spoken to him, for he settled back again--not, however, to sleep. It was all a picture; I heard no sounds. Then I saw Gertrude put down her book on the table and swing her feet from the _chaise-longue_, meaning to rise and greet Susan. But, as she attempted to stand up, the light coverlet entangled her feet and tripped her; she lost her balance, tried with a violent, awkward lurch of her whole body to recover herself, and stamped rather than stepped full on the dog's forepaws. He writhed, springing up between her feet--the whole grotesque catastrophe was, in effect, a single, fatal gesture!--and Gertrude, throwing her hands instinctively before her face, fell heavily forward, the length of her body, prone. I saw Susan rush toward her---- And the psychic reel flickered out, blanked.... I needed to see no more. "Don't you agree with me, Mr. Hunt?" Conlon was asking. "No," I said bluntly. "No madwoman would have summoned a doctor. Miss Blake called it a terrible accident. It was. Her present state is due to the horror of it. When she wakes, it will all be explained. Now take me to her." Conlon's gray-blue glance fixed me once more. "All right," he grunted, "I've no objections. But I'd 'a' thought your first wish would 'a' been to see your wife." "No," I replied. "Mrs. Hunt separated from me years ago, for reasons of her own. I bore her no ill will; in a sense, I respected her, admired her. Understand me, Sergeant Conlon. There was nothing vulgar in her life, and her death in this stupid way--oh, it's indecent, damnable! A cheap outrage! I could do nothing for her living, and can do nothing now. But I prefer to remember her as she was. _She_ would prefer it, too."