Time passed.  The evening waned and became night.  A full moon rose red and wonderful out of a bank of inky cloud, lighting the darkness with an oddly tropical effect.  The night was tropical, breathless, terribly still.  It seemed as if a storm must be upon its way.

She began to undress at last there in the moonlight.  The heat was too intense to veil the windows, and she would not light the candles lest bats or moths should be attracted.  At another time the eerieness of the shadowy room would have played upon her nerves, but to-night she was not even aware of it.  The shadows within were too dark, too sinister.

A great weariness had come upon her.  She ached for rest.  Her body felt leaden, and her brain like a burnt-out furnace.  The very capacity for thought seemed to have left her.  Only the horror of the day loomed gigantic whichever way she turned, blotting out all beside.  Prayer was an impossibility to her.  She felt lost in a wilderness of doubt, forsaken and wandering, and terribly alone.

If she could rest, if she could sleep, she thought that strength might return to her—­the strength to grapple with and overthrow the evil that had entered into and tainted her whole life.  But till sleep should come to her, she was impotent.  She was heavy and numb with fatigue.

She lay down at length with a vague sense of physical relief beneath her crushing weight of trouble.  How unutterably weary she was!  How tired—­how tired of life!

Time passed.  The moon rose higher, filling the room with its weird cold light.  Avery lay asleep.

Exhaustion had done for her what no effort of will could have accomplished, closing her eyes, drawing a soft veil of oblivion across her misery.

But it was only a temporary lull.  The senses were too alert, too fevered, for true repose.  That blessed interval of unconsciousness was all too short.  After a brief, brief respite she began to dream.

And in her dream she saw a man being tortured in a burning, fiery furnace, imprisoned behind bars of iron, writhing, wrestling, agonizing, to be free.  She saw the flames leaping all around him, and in the flames were demon-faces that laughed and gibed and jested.  She saw his hands all blistered in the heat, reaching out to her, straining through those cruel bars, beseeching her vainly for deliverance.  And presently, gazing with a sick horror that compelled, she saw his face....

With a gasping cry she awoke, started up with every nerve stretched and quivering, her heart pounding as if it would choke her.  It was a dream—­it was a dream!  She whispered it to herself over and over again, striving to control those awful palpitations.  Surely it was all a dream!

Stay!  What was that?  A sound in the room beyond—­a movement—­a step!  She sprang up, obeying blind impulse, sped softly to the intervening door, with hands that trembled shot the bolt.  Then, like a hunted creature, almost distracted by the panic of her dream, she slipped back to the gloomy four-poster, and cowered down again.