my tongue was tied when I tried to tell the others.  I got up, and ran out.  The moment I was in the street my steps turned back of themselves on the way to the house.  I called a cab, and told the man to drive (as far as a shilling would take me) the opposite way.  He put me down—­I don’t know where.  Across the street I saw an inscription in letters of flame over an open door.  The man said it was a dancing-place.  Dancing was as new to me as play-going.  I had one more shilling left; and I paid to go in, and see what a sight of the dancing would do for me.  The light from the ceiling poured down in this place as if it was all on fire.  The crashing of the music was dreadful.  The whirling round and round of men and women in each other’s arms was quite maddening to see.  I don’t know what happened to me here.  The great blaze of light from the ceiling turned blood-red on a sudden.  The man standing in front of the musicians waving a stick took the likeness of Satan, as seen in the picture in our family Bible at home.  The whirling men and women went round and round, with white faces like the faces of the dead, and bodies robed in winding-sheets.  I screamed out with the terror of it; and some person took me by the arm and put me outside the door.  The darkness did me good:  it was comforting and delicious—­like a cool hand laid on a hot head.  I went walking on through it, without knowing where; composing my mind with the belief that I had lost my way, and that I should find myself miles distant from home when morning dawned.  After some time I got too weary to go on; and I sat me down to rest on a door-step.  I dozed a bit, and woke up.  When I got on my feet to go on again, I happened to turn my head toward the door of the house.  The number on it was the same number an as ours.  I looked again.  And behold, it was our steps I had been resting on.  The door was our door.

“All my doubts and all my struggles dropped out of my mind when I made that discovery.  There was no mistaking what this perpetual coming back to the house meant.  Resist it as I might, it was to be.

“I opened the street door and went up stairs, and heard him sleeping his heavy sleep, exactly as I had heard him when I went out.  I sat down on my bed and took off my bonnet, quite quiet in myself, because I knew it was to be.  I damped the towel, and put it ready, and took a turn in the room.

“It was just the dawn of day.  The sparrows were chirping among the trees in the square hard by.

“I drew up my blind; the faint light spoke to me as if in words, ’Do it now, before I get brighter, and show too much.’

“I listened.  The friendly silence had a word for me too:  ’Do it now, and trust the secret to Me.’

“I waited till the church clock chimed before striking the hour.  At the first stroke—­without touching the lock of his door, without setting foot in his room—­I had the towel over his face.  Before the last stroke he had ceased struggling.  When the hum of the bell through the morning silence was still and dead, he was still and dead with it.”