“Both men were perhaps surprised to see that the gray and white of early daybreak had already come.  One of them, however, had emotions calculated to swallow up surprise.  Brakespeare College was one of the few that retained real traces of Gothic ornament, and just beneath Dr. Eames’s balcony there ran out what had perhaps been a flying buttress, still shapelessly shaped into gray beasts and devils, but blinded with mosses and washed out with rains.  With an ungainly and most courageous leap, Eames sprang out on this antique bridge, as the only possible mode of escape from the maniac.  He sat astride of it, still in his academic gown, dangling his long thin legs, and considering further chances of flight.  The whitening daylight opened under as well as over him that impression of vertical infinity already remarked about the little lakes round Brakespeare.  Looking down and seeing the spires and chimneys pendent in the pools, they felt alone in space.  They felt as if they were looking over the edge from the North Pole and seeing the South Pole below.

“`Hang the world, we said,’ observed Smith, `and the world is hanged.  “He has hanged the world upon nothing,” says the Bible.  Do you like being hanged upon nothing?  I’m going to be hanged upon something myself.  I’m going to swing for you...  Dear, tender old phrase,’ he murmured; `never true till this moment.  I am going to swing for you.  For you, dear friend.  For your sake.  At your express desire.’

“`Help!’ cried the Warden of Brakespeare College; `help!’

“`The puppy struggles,’ said the undergraduate, with an eye of pity, `the poor puppy struggles.  How fortunate it is that I am wiser and kinder than he,’ and he sighted his weapon so as exactly to cover the upper part of Eames’s bald head.

“`Smith,’ said the philosopher with a sudden change to a sort of ghastly lucidity, `I shall go mad.’

“`And so look at things from the right angle,’ observed Smith, sighing gently. `Ah, but madness is only a palliative at best, a drug.  The only cure is an operation—­an operation that is always successful:  death.’

“As he spoke the sun rose.  It seemed to put colour into everything, with the rapidity of a lightning artist.  A fleet of little clouds sailing across the sky changed from pigeon-gray to pink.  All over the little academic town the tops of different buildings took on different tints:  here the sun would pick out the green enameled on a pinnacle, there the scarlet tiles of a villa; here the copper ornament on some artistic shop, and there the sea-blue slates of some old and steep church roof.  All these coloured crests seemed to have something oddly individual and significant about them, like crests of famous knights pointed out in a pageant or a battlefield:  they each arrested the eye, especially the rolling eye of Emerson Eames as he looked round on the morning and accepted it as his last.  Through a narrow