The old cathedral takes up a square. In the niches of its outer wall stand the stone effigies of many saints. Before its triple, iron-studded doors stretches a tiled terrace. At its right runs a side-street, and, attracted by a patch of clambering vine on the time-stained walls, where the moon fell full upon them, Saxon turned into the byway. At the far end, the facade rose blankly, fronting a bare drill-ground, and there he halted. The painter had not counted on the moon. Now, as he took his place against the wall, it bathed him in an almost effulgent whiteness. The shadows of the abutments were inky in contrast, and the disused and ancient cannon, planted at the curb for a corner post, stood out boldly in relief. But the street was silent and, except for himself, absolutely deserted. For a time, he stood looking outward. From somewhere at his back, in the vaultlike recesses of the building, drifted the heavy pungency of incense burning at a shrine. His ears were alert for the sounds that might, in their drifting inconsequence, mean everything. Then, as no reminder came, he closed his eyes, and wracked his imagination in concentrated thought as a monitor to memory. He groped after some detail of the other time, if the other time had been an actual fragment of his life. He strove to recall the features of the officer who commanded the death squad, some face that had stood there before him on that morning; the style of uniforms they wore. He kept his eyes closed, not only for seconds, but for minutes, and, when in answer to his focused self-hypnotism and prodding suggestion no answer came, there came in its stead a torrent of joyous relief. Then, he heard something like a subdued ejaculation, and opened his eyes upon a startling spectacle. Leaning out from the shadow of an abutment stood a thin man, whose face in the moon showed a strange mingling of savagery and terror. It was a face Saxon did not remember to have seen before. The eyes glittered, and the teeth showed as the thin lips were drawn back over them in a snarling sort of smile. But the most startling phase of the tableau, to the man who opened his eyes upon it without warning, was the circumstance of the unknown's pressing an automatic pistol against his breast. Saxon's first impression was that he had fallen prey to a robber, but he knew instinctively that this expression was not that of a man bent on mere thievery. It had more depth and evil satisfaction. It was the look of a man who turns a trick in an important game. As the painter gazed at the face and figure bending forward from the abutment's sooty shadow like some chimera or gargoyle fashioned in the wall, his first sentiment was less one of immediate peril than of argument with himself. Surely, so startling a denouement should serve to revive his memory, if he had faced other muzzles there!