Overstrung to a pitch of madness, I felt my way to the foot of the stairs, and, stumbling, mounted in the darkness, and reached the first landing. All was still as death. Perhaps it was death come in a new shape, and stealthily lying somewhere to trip up my feet in a ghastly game of clowns. I dared not go further; dared hardly to breathe. As I stood, a rat began gnawing at the skirting. The jar of his teeth was like the turning of a rusty lock. The old superstition about falling houses passed through my mind. What if the close night about me were to be suddenly rent with the explosive splintering of great beams--with the raining thunder of roof and chimney-stack pouring downward in one vast ruin, of which I should be the mangled palpitating core? My body burst into a cold sweat. Perhaps above all the fear in me was that death should find me with my mission unaccomplished; that I should have striven and waited in vain. Shrinking, I would not push further to the upper rooms, but felt my way down the stairs once more. It was, at least, hardly probable that Jason would have rushed for asylum to the very death chambers above. More likely was I to find him crouching unnerved, if still alive, in some dark corner of one of the lower rooms. As I descended into the passage I fancied I heard a step coming toward me; and the next moment a dusky shape stood up between me and the dim oblong of lesser darkness that marked where the front door gaped open. I ran forward--grasped at it blindly; and long arms were crooked about me and held me as in a vise. “Who’s here?” cried Dr. Crackenthorpe, in a mad voice. “Who is it? Say, Renalt Trender, and let me choke the cursed life out of him!” His passion would hardly allow him to articulate. He dragged me unresisting to the door, up the yard, and thrust his ugly face down till it almost touched mine. “It is!” he cried, with a scream of fury. “Look--look there! See what you’ve done!” I had marked it already--a dull glow rising over the houses and chimney pots that lay between us and Chis’ll street--a glow writhed with twisted skeins of smoke, that rolled heavily upward, coiling sluggishly in the calm that had fallen. “Look!” he screeched; “the priceless treasures of a life--the glories I bartered my soul for--doomed, in a moment, and by your act! Oh, dog, for revenge!” “You lie!” I cried, outshrieking his rage with a fury that half-shook him from his hold on me. “I had no part in it! You saw it and you know! Go! Attend to your own. I’ve deadlier work in hand.” I tore myself free of him with a violence that brought him on his knees, and hurried up the yard once more and into the pitchy house. He came upon me again while I was fumbling in my pockets for a match, but he put out no hand to me a second time.