just as he came stumbling in. Starwick was raving, demented, no longer conscious of his acts: he began to smash and beat at the bed with his stick, crying:
“There!—And there!—And there!—Out, out, damned spot, and make an end to you…. The stranger—the one I never knew—the stranger you have become—out! Out! Out!”
Turning to Eugene then, he peered at him with drunken bloodshot eyes, and said:
“Who are you?—Are you the stranger?—Are you the one I never knew?—Or are you… ?” His voice trailed off feebly, and he sank down into a chair, sobbing drunkenly.
And getting to his feet at length he looked about him wildly, smote the bed again with his stick, and cried out loudly:
“Where is Eugene? Where is the Eugene that I knew?—Where?—Where?—Where?” He staggered to the door and flung it open, screaming: “Alec! Where are you?”
He reeled out into the hall, and for a moment hung dangerously against the stair rail, peering drunkenly down into the dizzy pit five flights below. Eugene ran after him, seized him by the arm and, together, they fell or reeled to the bottom. It was a journey as distorted and demented as a dream—a descent to be remembered later as a kind of corkscrew nightmare, broken by blind lurchings into a creaking rail, by the rattling of Starwick’s stick upon the banisters, by blind sprawls, and stumblings, and by blobs and blurs of frightened faces at each landing, where Monsieur Gely’s more sober patrons waited in breath-caught silence at their open doors. They reached the bottom finally amid such universal thanksgiving, such prayers for their safety, as Gely’s hotel had never known before.
A vast sigh, a huge and single respiration of relief rustled up the steep dark pit of the winding stairs. But another peril lay before them. At the foot of the stairs there stood a monstrous five-foot vase which, by its lustre and the loving care with which it was polished every day by Marie, the maid, must have been the pride of the establishment. Starwick reeled blindly against it as he went past, the thing rocked sickeningly, and even as it tottered slowly over, Eugene heard Madame Gely’s gasp of terror, heard her low “Mon Dieu! Ca tombe, ça tombe!” and a loud united “Ah-h-h!” of thankfulness as he caught it in his hands, and gently, safely, with such inner triumph as a man may feel who leaps through space and lands safely hanging to a flying trapeze, restored it to
