Someone was looking at him. He knew it--_felt_ it. He was aware, too, of a feeling of bodily discomfort--a peculiar sensation that, beginning in his brain, crept down through his nerves and muscles, leaving him cramped and paralyzed. His subconscious physician's mind automatically analyzed it as a sort of _rigor_. It constricted his throat, twisting itself around his huge limbs like hoops of steel, crushing him like an incubus. He fought with himself in an effort to open his eyes. A voice was commanding him to sleep. He mastered the desire and raised his eye-lids. A mocking face was glaring into his own. It was that of Aaron Kronk. Hugo Lamontaine had yet to know the meaning of fear. He had faced death laughingly in a thousand ways on modern battlefields. Yet, gazing into the malevolent eyes of Aaron Kronk, bound hand and foot by invisible bands, he realized now what it meant. The thin man was gazing at him with malignant ferocity. His eyes, bearing a message of hatred, seemed to tear the physician's brain from its very roots. He tried to struggle against them, but in vain. They dissolved themselves into a single, glittering orb--an eye that whirled and grew closer and closer like the headlight of an oncoming locomotive. A voice commanded him to sleep ... sleep ... sleep.... Then consciousness left him. In spite of the command that had chiseled itself into his brain, he was subconsciously fighting against it. He floated back from his hebetude ... wondered if he was dreaming. At first he believed that he was--that he would soon wake up and find that he suffered from a nightmare. Then, by slow gradations, realization crept over him.... He was surrounded by something. It enveloped him like a thin cloud, pressing him down like a weight, inhibiting his breathing. He tried to struggle against it--to open his eyes. But that commanding voice continued to order him to sleep ... _sleep_.... His throat and chest seemed to constrict. He attempted to summon his laggard will-power--in vain. The slow, relentless pressure continued. The breath was being slowly pumped from his body, from his lungs, his heart.... He knew that he was on the verge of asphyxiation--that his huge frame was being slowly deflated--robbed of its vitality as surely and inexorably as it had been stolen from the emaciated body of old Jacques d'Arcy. He tried to open his eyes. They were held down by invisible fingers.