Tollman had never been a handsome man, but his face and carriage had held a certain stiff semblance of dignity. Now his cheeks flamed with the temperature which must, without the immediate administration of a powerful sedative, burn out his life with its crisping and charring virulence. His eyes were no longer human, but transformed into that kinship with those of wild beasts or red embers that comes with acute mania. As the shadows wavered in the room which he had made a place of murder, there rose out of them taunting, accusing figures. He seemed to see Hagan, the detective, grotesquely converted into an executioner clad in red and Sam Haymond launching against him the anathema of the Church. There were shapes of strange things neither human, animal nor reptile--but wholly monstrous--emerging greedily from filthy lairs and creeping toward him with sinuous movements through a sea of slime. For the furies that haunted Orestes, because of his classic crime, had come back to pursue Eben Tollman. He laughed as maniacs laugh and screamed as maniacs scream, until the strange medley of insensate sounds went rocketing and skittering through the house and came back in echo, as the retort of the furies. One human sense was left: the sense of flight: the impulse to leave the place where Death held dominion and Death's avengers came in unclean and rapacious hordes. Turning, he fled with a speed born of his dementia, hurling himself through the door with a crash of shattered glass and a trail of incoherent ravings. Without sense of direction or objective he raced here and there, doubling like a frightened rabbit, taking no account of paths or obstructions, seeing nothing but hordes of pursuing furies urged on by a parson and a hangman who led the chase. The storm had begun anew, and out here in the darkness the cannonading of thunder and wind swelled the chorus of pursuit. When the refugee fell, he clawed and bit at the vines which had tripped him, in a fancied battle of Laocooen, until at last he saw the coolness of water ahead of him, and, dashing down the slope, hurled himself, shrieking, into its stillness. There his outcry ended. His spread fingers clutched at a liquid emptiness and his fevered eyes showed once or twice briefly--and were quenched. CHAPTER XXXIII The logs on the hearth leaped and crackled, spurting tongues of blue flame, and after they had roared up to their fullest they slowly subsided, until the shadows about the walls spread and encroached from their corners toward the center of the room. The polish of furniture and the bright angles of silver and bric-a-brac stood out with diminishing high-lights. Hour by hour and minute by minute the faces of two unmoving figures seated on a low and heavily cushioned couch grew less clear and merged into the growing darkness. Then the logs glowed only as embers against their bed of white ashes and the table lamp burned on in single steadfastness.