I must have looked at the speakers just then with a rather sorry expression of bewilderment. Then I quickly lowered my head like a child afraid to be seen. They had spoken for /me,/ and I sensed a strange secret service intrigue around me. Then, in an instant this impression, which had got the better of my common sense, gave way. Evidently a pure coincidence. Still I was left with the vague apprehension that they were going to notice that I /knew,/ and were going to recognise me. One of the novelist's friends begged him to tell more of his story. He consented. He was going to tell it in my presence! . . . . . With admirable art in the use of words, gestures, and mimicry, and with a lively elegance and a contagious laugh, he described a series of brilliant, surprising scenes. Under cover of his scheme, which brought all the scenes out into peculiar relief and gave them a special intensity, he retailed a lot of amusing oddities, described comical persons and things, heaped up picturesque and piquant details, coined typical and witty proper names, and invented complicated and ingenious situations. He succeeded in producing irresistible effects, and the whole was in the latest style. They said, "Ah!" and "Oh!" and opened their eyes wide. "Bravo! A sure success! A corking funny idea!" "All the characters who pass before the eyes of the man spying upon them are amusing, even the man who kills himself. Nothing forgotten. The whole of humanity is there." But I had not recognized a single thing in the entire show. A stupor and a sort of shame overwhelmed me as I heard that man trying to extract the utmost entertainment possible from the dark happenings that had been torturing me for a month. I thought of that great voice, now silenced, which had said so clearly and forcefully that the writers of to-day imitate the caricaturists. I, who had penetrated into the heart of humanity and returned again, found nothing human in this jiggling caricature! It was so superficial that it was a lie. He said in front of me--of me the awful witness: "It is man stripped of all outward appearances that I want people to see. Others are fiction, I am the truth." "It has a philosophical bearing, too." "Perhaps. But that wasn't my object. Thank God, I am a writer, and not a thinker." And he continued to travesty the truth, and I was impotent--the truth, that profound thing whose voice was in my ears, whose shadow was in my eyes, and whose taste was in my mouth. Was I so utterly forsaken? Would no one speak the word I was in search of? . . . . . The Room was flooded with moonlight. In that magnificent setting there was an obscure white couple, two silent human beings with marble faces. The fire was out. The clock had finished its work and had stopped, and was listening with its heart.