His footsteps echoed startlingly on the stones, and the chill breath of the place smote his face as he moved.  He stumbled on a displaced tile and pitched forward upon a jagged corner of sarcophagus, and reeled as if at a blow from some arm of the darkness.  The taper rays struck a length of wall before him, minting from the gloom a sheet of pale orchids clinging to the unclean rock.  St. George remembered a green slope, spangled with crocuses and wild strawberries, coloured like the orchids but lying under free sky, in free air.  It seemed only a trick of Chance that he was not now lying on that far slope, wherever it was, instead of facing these ghost blooms in this ghost place.  Back there, where the light glimmered beside the tomb of King Abibaal, nobody could tell what awaited him.  If the man could change like this, might he not take on some shape too hideous to bear in the silence?  St. George stood still, suddenly clenching his hands, trying to reach out through the dark and to grasp—­himself, the self that seemed slipping away from him.  But was he mad already, he wondered angrily, and hurried back to the far flickering light, stumbling, panting, not daring to look at the figure on the floor, not daring not to look.

He resolutely caught up the candle and peered once more at the face.  As steadily and swiftly as change in the aspect of the sky the face had gone on changing.  St. George had followed to the chamber an old tottering man; the figure before him was a man of not more than fifty years.

St. George let fall the candle, which flickered down, upright in its socket; and he turned away, his hand across his eyes.  Since this was manifestly impossible he must be mad, something in the stuff that he had tasted had driven him mad.  He felt strong as a lion, strong enough to lift that prostrate figure and to carry it through the winding passages into the midst of those above stairs, and to beg them in mercy to tell him how the man looked.  What would she say?  He wondered what Olivia would say.  Dinner would be over and they would be in the drawing-room—­Olivia and Amory and Antoinette Frothingham; already the white room and the lights and Antoinette’s laughter seemed to him of another world, a world from which he had irrevocably passed.  Yet there they were above, the same roof covering them, and they did not know that down here in this place of the dead he, St. George, was beyond all question going mad.

With a cry he pulled off Amory’s coat, flung it over the unconscious man, and rushed out into the blackness of the corridor.  He would not take the light—­the man must not die alone there in the dark—­and besides he had heard that the mad could see as well in the dark as in the light.  Or was it the blind who could see in the dark?  No doubt it was the blind.  However, he could find his way, he thought triumphantly, and ran on, dragging his hand along the slippery stones of the wall—­he could find his way.  Only he