When I came to myself a dim wash of daylight soaking through the blurred window had found my face as I lay prone upon the boards, and was crawling up to my eyes like a child to open them. An ineffable soft sense of peace kept still my exhausted limbs in the first waking moments, and only by degrees occurred to me the horror and tragedy of the previous night. Still I made no attempt to rise, hoping only in forlorn self-pity that death would come to me gently as I lay and take me by the hand, saying: “With the vexing problems of life you need nevermore trouble yourself.” All around, save for the deep murmur of water, was deathly quiet, and I prayed that it might remain so; that nothing might ever recall me to weariful action again. Then a faint groan came to my ears and the misericordious spell was broken. Slowly and feebly I gathered myself together to rise. But a second moan dissipated the selfish shadow and stung me to some reluctant action. Leaning upon my hand I looked about me and could hardly believe the evidence of my senses when I saw the walls and rafters of the fateful room stretching about me unaltered and unscathed. The crash, that had seemed to involve all in one splintering ruin, had left, seemingly, no evidence of its nature whatsoever. Only, for a considerable distance from the mouth of the cupboard, the floor was stained with a sop of water; and, not a dozen feet from me, huddled in the darkest of it, lay a heaped and sodden mass that stirred and sent forth another moan as I looked. Painfully, then, I got upon my feet and stole, with no sentiment but a weak curiosity, to the prostrate thing. It was as if I had died and my dissatisfied ghost postponed its departure, seeking the last explanation of things. Thus, while my soul was sensitive to the least expression of the tragedy that absorbed it, in the human world outside it seemed no longer to feel an interest. And here, under my eyes, was tumbled the latest grim victim of this house accursed--the engineer of much diabolical machinery mangled by the demon he had himself evoked. What a pitiful, collapsed ruin, that, for all its resourcefulness, could only moan and suffer! Only a thin thread of crimson ran from the corner of his mouth, and where it had made during the night a little pool on the floor under his head it looked like ink. Near him lay a great jagged block of wood green with slime. I crept to the cupboard opening and looked down. The wheel was gone! Then I knew what had happened. The house had triumphed over the stubborn monster that had so long proved its curse. At the supreme moment the vast dam had yielded and saved the building. It had gone, leaving not a trace of wreckage but this--this, and the single torn fragment that had struck down the wretch who set it in motion--had gone, bearing away with it in one boiling ruin the crushed and twisted bodies of the last two victims of its insensate fury.