Criswell's face went blank as he saw the movement. It was now not even somnambulistic in intelligence. It maddened me to think he was going to fail me at such a critical moment. "What are you breaking down for?" I cried. "Why don't you go on?" He was silent, looking ahead of him. "I--_I see blue_," he finally said, as though to himself. His face was clammy with sweat. "What sort of blue?" I prompted. "Blue cloth? Blue sky? Blue ink? Blue _what_?" "_It's blue_," he repeated, ignoring my interruption. And all his soul seemed writhing and twisting in some terrible travail of mental childbirth. "I see blue. And you're making it white. You're covering it up. You're turning over white--white--white! Oh, what in God's name is it?" My spine was again tingling with a thousand electric needles as I watched him. He turned to me with a gesture of piteous appeal. "What was it?" he implored. "Can't you help me get it--get it before it goes! What was it?" "It was blue, blue and white," I told him, and as I said it I realized what madhouse jargon it would have sounded to any outsider. He sank into a chair, and let his head fall forward on his hands. He did not speak for several seconds. "And there are two hills covered with snow," he slowly intoned. My heart sank a little as I heard him. I knew I had overtaxed his strength. He was wandering off again into irrelevancies. He had missed the high jump. "That's all right, old man," I tried to console him. "There's no use overdoing this. You sit there for a while and calm down." As I sank into a chair on the other side of the desk, defeated, staring wearily about that book-lined room that was housing so indeterminate a tragedy, the door on my left was thrown open. Through it stepped a woman in an ivory-tinted dinner gown over which was thrown a cloth-of-gold cloak. I sat there blinking up at her, for it was Mary Lockwood herself. It was not so much her sudden appearance as the words she spoke to the huddled figure on the other side of the desk that startled me. "You were right," she said, with a self-obliterating intensity of purpose. "Father taps his thumbs. I saw him do it an hour ago!" I sat staring at her as she stood in the center of the room, a tower of ivory and gold against the dull and mottled colors of the book-lined wall. I waited for her to speak. Then out of the mottled colors that confronted my eye, out of the faded yellows and rusty browns, the dull greens and brighter reds, and the gilt of countless titles, my gaze rested on a near-by oblong of blue. I looked at it without quite seeing it. Then it came capriciously home to me that blue had been the color that Criswell had mentioned. But after all blue is only blue, I vacuously told myself as I got up and crossed the room. Then I saw the white streak at the top of the book, and for no adequate reason my heart suddenly leaped up into my throat.