“I used to have the shakes regularly, like any other confirmed alcoholic. The d.t.’s can be pretty awful, you know, and my personal cross was to wake up from a binge and imagine myself all covered with spiders. It happened so many times that I lost count, and usually it meant several days in a hospital ward before I recovered. “But one particular morning I woke up with spiders that wouldn’t go away. They were real, though they weren’t spiders at all, and they were anything but the horrors I’d dreamed of. They were such incredibly pleasant creatures--whatever they were, and are--that just being associated so closely with them made a new man of me overnight. I was perfectly happy until I came here and met Kitty.” “I can see they’re not common or garden variety Arachnida,” Mr. Marcus said. He could with justification, for two of them had perched on the rim of Adrian’s collar and were observing him with a bland good-nature impossible to doubt. “You’ve no idea what they really are?” “Not the faintest,” Adrian said. “I’m not going to quote _Hamlet_, but a great many things happen every day in the world that no one understands. Personally, I think they were drawn here from some other plane or dimension by the strength of my obsession. I can’t be sure of that because I can’t talk to them, but I do feel that I’m responsible for them. And they’ve done so much for me that I can’t just brush them off. It would be inhuman.” “You’re right, of course,” Mr. Marcus agreed. “But on the other hand, neither can you brush off Kitty. You’re in the position of the man who couldn’t go but couldn’t stay.” Adrian nodded unhappily “There you have it. Mr. Marcus, what am I going to do?” But Mr. Marcus, unlike the Saki he had been reading, had no instant and adequate answer. And, since the next day was his last in Maysville for the season and he could not linger on in unemployment at Mrs. Ponder’s even to help the couple who had become his dearest friends, he was forced to take the 8:04 to St. Louis without having discovered any solution to Adrian’s problem. It was a shame, Mr. Marcus thought when he was somewhere in the neighborhood of Hannibal, Missouri, that such things never seem to work out in everyday life as conveniently as they do in fiction. It was entirely possible that he might never learn the outcome of Adrian’s problem, and at best he had a year to wait. * * * * * Mr. Marcus, at the end of his forty-first year of selling novelties to novelty shops, returned again to Maysville. But not immediately to Mrs. Ponder’s boarding house. A prosperously-dressed Adrian met him at the station with a conservative but handsome new station wagon. With Adrian was Kitty, still blind but lovelier than ever, and in Kitty’s arms gurgled their firstborn, a boy named Marcus Jay Hall.