“I won’t, Duke--I won’t. But I wish you would tell me what danger it is you fear.” “If I did you would think it nothing but a phantom of my brain. I have said I see in the dark. This room is full of fantastic shapes to me. Perhaps they are only the goblin lights born of warp and disease.” “I will speak to her next Sunday.” “Not sooner?” “I can’t very well. We must be alone together without risk of interruption.” I would have told him of our yesterday’s talk, only that it seemed a cruel thing to take even him into that broken and tender confidence. “Very well. Let it be then, as you value her happiness.” All day it had been close and oppressive and now thunder began to moan and complain up the lower slopes of the night. Suddenly, in the ominous stirring of the gloom, I became conscious that my companion was murmuring to himself--that a low current of speech was issuing from his lips monotonous as the babble of delirium. “There was a window in the roof, where stars glittered like bubbles in the glass--and the ceiling came almost down to the floor on one side and I cried often with terror, for the window and I were alone. Sometimes the frost gathered there, like white skin over a wound, and sometimes the monstrous clouds looked in and mocked and nodded at me. I was very cold or else my face cracked like earth with the heat, and I could not run away, for he had thrown me down years before and the marrow dried in my bones. There had been a time when the woman came with her white face and loved me, always listening, and crept away looking back. But she went at last and I never saw her again.” “Duke!” I whispered--“Duke!” but he seemed lost to all sense of my presence. “He came often, and there was a great dog with him, whose flesh writhed with folds of gray, and the edges of his tongue were curled up like a burning leaf--and the dog made my heart sick, for its eyes were full of hate like his, and when he made it snarl at me I shivered with terror lest a movement of mine should bring it upon me. And sometimes I heard it breathing outside the door and thought if they had forgotten to lock it and it came in I should die. But they never forgot, and I was left alone with the window in the roof and nothing else. But now I feel that if I could meet that dog--now, now I should scream and tear it with my teeth and torture it inch by inch for what it made me suffer.” I cried to him again, but he took no heed. “There was water, in the end, and great dark buildings went up from it and the thunder was thick in the sky. Then he said, ‘Drink,’ and held something to my lips; and I obeyed because I was in terror of him. It was fire he gave me, and I could not shriek because it took me by the throat--but I fell against the water and felt it lap toward me and I woke screaming and I was in a boat--I was in a boat, I tell you.”