Slowly and with infinite pain he wrote, printing the letters in thick and crooked capitals, whilst his breath whistled through the dilated nostrils and one foot beat unceasingly against the desk.

“The answer to the problem concerning Leonie Hetth is in the third volume upon——­”

His hand stopped suddenly when the fingers involuntarily spread wide apart, letting fall the pen which rolled across the book; and the silvery head turned inch by inch until the grey eyes had lifted to the one shining in the shadows.

And there commenced a desperate, a bitter struggle for a child’s reason, perhaps for a child’s life, as the moon gently withdrew her light.

Like the clammy wraiths of fog upon the moor, like the searching tentacles of some blind monster of the sea, fear crept upon the splendid old man in this still hour of the night.

It held his hands, it was folded about his mouth, it pounded violently upon his gallant heart, whilst the eye looked him between the eyes, so that his brain was seared as strive he might to turn away his head he kept his face turned piteously upward.

“What is it,” he muttered thickly, as though his tongue clove to the roof of the mouth, “what is it that is pulling me, pressing upon me, choking me!  I have no body, no—­no hands—­I—­have—­no power to move—­I——­”

And then he screamed, though but a whisper fell, as with a spasmodic jump of his whole body he flung himself round in his chair, and cowering low against the arm, peered into the deepening shadows.

“All round about me,” he whispered, “all about me those hands are pulling, and yet—­and—­and——­”

He laughed until his face, a white cameo against a grey velvet pall, grinned like a mask of mirthless death, as slowly he raised one clenched fist and shook it weakly until it fell back with a dull thud, useless, against the chair.

“I thought I was afraid—­I—­I thought I saw—­I saw death behind—­but I—­I shall not die until—­until I have written—­written—­what is it I am to write—­ah! yes!”

Searching sideways with his left hand he groped and found the pen, then very carefully, very slowly turned towards the desk.

He drove the pen in fiercely, making a thick black mark; he pushed it until the nib stuck, spluttered, and broke as he flung out both hands as if grasping at something which evaded him.

“Gone!” he mouthed, though there was no sound of speech in the room.  “Gone—­gone!” and he suddenly tore at his collar and his cuffs as though to break some bond which held him, as he glanced furtively about the room.

For one long moment he sat leaning forward, staring far beyond the Indian screen upon which his eyes were fixed, and then slowly, almost imperceptibly, his head moved.

The drawn white face had the hunted look of some animal at bay, the agonised eyes moved as the head moved; slowly, slowly, inch by inch, the breath coming stertorously as the mouth tried vainly to frame some word.