“Carlos!” he whispered.

He heard Maria’s voice dimly: 

“Take him home.”

A hand touched his arm.  With a supreme effort of will he walked from the room, guided by the hand on his arm.  And always his brain recorded fewer and fewer impressions for his memory to struggle with later.

At the cloak room some one helped him put on his coat.  He was walking down steps.  He was in some kind of a conveyance.  He didn’t know what it was.  An automobile, a carriage, a train?  He didn’t know.  He only understood that it went swiftly, swaying from side to side through a sable pit.  Whenever his mind moved at all it came back to that sensation of a black pit in which he remained suspended, swinging from side to side, trying to struggle up against impossible odds.  Once or twice words flashed like fire through the pit:  “Tyrant!—­Fool to go.”

From a long immersion deeper in the pit he struggled frantically.  He must get out.  Somehow he must find wings.  He realized that his eyes were closed.  He tried to open them and failed.  So the pit persisted and he surrendered himself, as one accepts death, to its hateful blackness.

Abruptly he experienced a momentary release.  There was no more swaying, no more movement of any kind.  He heard a strange, melancholy voice, whispering without words, always whispering with a futile perseverance as if it wished him to understand something it could not express.

“What is it trying to tell me?” he asked himself.

Then he understood.  It was the voice of the wind, and it tried to tell him to open his eyes, and he found that he could.  But in spite of his desire they closed again almost immediately.  Yet, from that swift glimpse, a picture outlined itself later in his memory.

In the midst of wild, rolling clouds, the moon was a drowning face.  Stunted trees bent before the wind like puny men who strained impotently to advance.  Over there was one more like a real man—­a figure, Bobby thought, with a black thing over its face—­a mask.

“This is the forest near the Cedars,” Bobby said to himself.  “I’ve come to face the old devil after all.”

He heard his own voice, harsh, remote, unnatural, speaking to the dim figure with a black mask that waited half hidden by the straining trees.

“Why am I here in the woods near the Cedars?”

And he thought the thing answered: 

“Because you hate your grandfather.”

Bobby laughed, thinking he understood.  The figure in the black mask that accompanied him was his conscience.  He could understand why it went masked.

The wind resumed its whispering.  The figures, straining like puny men, fought harder.  The drowning face disappeared, wet and helpless.  Bobby felt himself sinking back, back into the sable pit.

“I don’t want to go,” he moaned.

A long time afterward he heard a whisper again, and he wondered if it was the wind or his conscience.  He laughed through the blackness because the words seemed so absurd.