"You've got me! Just pick the lady up, carry her out of that room, and have a show-down. Put her in your car and take her to town." "I gave her my word not----" "People can't stand bowing to each other when the ship's afire. If she is worth dying for, she doesn't want you to die for her." The simplicity of it! And, leaping the breach of faith, the temptation! What harm could I do Desire by this plan of Vere's? What good might I not do her? Was it mere slavishness of mind on my part not to overrule her timid will? She must pardon me when she realized my desperate case. A dying man might be excused for some roughness of haste, surely. Whether flight could save us I did not know. I did know absolutely that my enemy had crossed the Barrier last night, and I was prey merely withheld from It by the chance respite of a few daylight hours. Suppose our escape succeeded? A whole troup of pictures flitted across the screen of my fancy. Desire beside me in the city, my wife. Desire in those delightful shops that make Fifth Avenue gay as a garden of tulips, where I might buy for her frocks and hats, shoes of conspicuous frivolity and those long white gloves that seem to caress a woman's arm--everything fair and fine. Restaurants I had described for her, where she might dine in silken ease and perhaps hear played the music she had named---- I aroused myself and looked at Vere. "You'll do it?" he translated my expression. "I will, if she gives me the opportunity." "Do you judge she will?" "I hope so. Since she went so far as to show herself to you in order to send help to me when I was in danger, I believe she will come to my room tonight if I wait there----" He looked at me silently. The consternation and protest in his face were speech enough. "If I wait there alone," I finished somewhat hurriedly. "If she comes in time, we will try the plan. Have the car ready. You and Phillida will be prepared, of course. We will waste no time in getting away as far as possible." "And if that Thing comes before she does, Mr. Locke?" "Is there any other way?" "I guess you haven't considered that you're inviting me to stand by while you get yourself killed," he said stiffly. "I'm not an educated man. I never heard the names you mentioned this morning of people who used to study out things like this. I never heard of any worlds except earth and heaven and hell. But then I couldn't explain how an electric car runs. I know the car does run; and I know you nearly died last night. If you go back and stay alone in that room, we both know what you are going to meet." I turned away from him because I sickened at the prospect he evoked. The memory of that death-tide was too near and rolled too coldly across the future. If the trial had been hard when mercifully unanticipated, what would it be to meet my enemy now that I knew myself conquered? Would It not deliberately forestall Desire's coming, tonight?