head to himself and shouting from time to time:
“You’re right, Hunt!… God-damn it, man, you’re right!… Go on!… Go on! I agree with you! You’re right! Everybody else is wrong but Hunt and Cram!… Words by Hunt, music by Cram… no one’s right but Hunt and Cram!”
They tried to quiet him, but in vain. Suddenly Miss Potter began to cough and choke and gasp, pressed both hands over her heart, and gasped out in a terror-stricken voice:
“Oh, my God, I’m dying!”
Miss Flitcroft jumped to her feet and came running to her friend’s assistance, and then while Miss Flitcroft pounded the old woman on her back and the guests scrambled up in a general disruption of the party, Oswald Ten Eyck staggered to the window, flung it open, and looking out across one of the bleak snow-covered squares of Cambridge, screamed at the top of his voice:
“Relentless!… Relentless!… Juh sweez un art-e-e-este!” Here he beat on his little breast with a claw-like hand and yelled with drunken laughter, “And, Goddamn it, I will always be relentless… relentless… relentless!”
The cool air braced him with its cleansing shock: for a moment, the fog of shame and drunkenness shifted in his brain, he felt a vacancy of cold horror at his back, and turning suddenly found himself confronted by the frozen circle of their faces, fixed on him. And even in that instant glimpse of utter ruin, as the knowledge of this final catastrophe was printed on his brain, over the rim of frozen faces he saw the dial-hands of a clock. The time was seven-fifty-two: he knew there was a train at midnight for New York—and work, food, freedom, and forgetfulness. He would have four hours to go home and pack: if he hurried he could make it.
Little was heard of him thereafter. It was rumoured that he had gone back to his former lucrative employment with Mr. Hearst: and Professor Hatcher smiled thinly when he heard the news; the young men looked at one another with quiet smiles.
And yet he could not wholly be forgotten: occasionally someone mentioned him.
“A strange case, wasn’t it?” said Mr. Grey. “Do you remember how he looked? Like… like… really, he was like some mediæval ascetic. I thought he had something. I thought he would do something… I really did,
