Fred threw himself into a chair.  He felt tired.  Sharp, darting pains were stabbing his eyes.  “I think I’m going to be ill!” he said, with sudden irrelevance.

Storch lighted the oil stove.  “Crawl into bed and I’ll get you something hot to drink!”

Storch’s tone was kind to a point of softness, and yet, later, when he bent over the couch with a steaming glass in his hand Fred experienced a sharp revulsion.

“I dreamed all last night,” Fred said, almost defiantly, “that this room was a cobweb and that you were a huge spider, dangling on a thread.”

“And you were the fly, I suppose,” Storch replied, sneeringly.

The next instant he had touched Fred’s forehead gently, almost tenderly, but his eyes glittered beneath their shaggy brows with an insane ferocity...  Fred took the glass.  He was too ill to care much one way or the other.

CHAPTER XVIII

Next morning Fred Starratt knew that he was too ill to rise.  Then everything became hazy.  He had moments of consciousness when he sensed Storch’s figure moving in a sort of mist, flashing a green smile through the gloom.  He saw other figures, too—–­Helen Starratt, swathed in clinging black; Hilmer, displaying his mangled thumb; Monet with eyes of gentle reproach; and Ginger, very vague and very wistful.  There were times when the room seemed crowded with strange people who came and went and gesticulated, people gathering close to the dim lamp which Storch lighted at nightfall.

The visions of Monet were a curious mixture of shadow and reality.  Sometimes he seemed very elusive, but, again, his face would grow clear to the point of dazzling brightness.  At such moments Fred would screen his eyes and turn away, only in the end to catch a melting glimpse of Monet fading gradually with a gesture of resignation and regret.  But slowly the outlines of Monet grew less and less tangible and the personality of Storch more and more shot through with warm-breathed vitality, and the strange company that gathered at dusk about the lamp became living things instead of shadows.  Yet it took him some time to realize that these nightly gatherings at Storch’s were composed of real flesh and blood.

At first he was content to lie in a drowse and listen to the incoherent babblings of these nocturnal visitors, but, as he grew stronger, detached bits of conversation began to impress themselves upon him.  These people had each some pet grievance and it remained for Storch to pick upon the strings of their discontents with unerring accuracy.  At about eight o’clock every night the first stragglers would drift in, reinforced by a steady stream, until midnight saw a room stuffed with sweating humanity releasing their emotions in a biting flood of protests.  They protested at everything under the sun—­at custom, at order, at work, at play, at love, at life itself.  And Storch, for the most part silent, would sit with