being, drunk with an insensate frenzy, delirious with inhuman longings.  As she approached to offer to me her loathed caresses, I was on a sudden conscious of something which I had not felt before when in her company.  It was as though something had slipped away from me,—­some weight which had oppressed me, some bond by which I had been bound.  I was aroused, all at once, to a sense of freedom; to a knowledge that the blood which coursed through my veins was after all my own, that I was master of my own honour.

’I can only suppose that through all those weeks she had kept me there in a state of mesmeric stupor.  That, taking advantage of the weakness which the fever had left behind, by the exercise of her diabolical arts, she had not allowed me to pass out of a condition of hypnotic trance.  Now, for some reason, the cord was loosed.  Possibly her absorption in her religious duties had caused her to forget to tighten it.  Anyhow, as she approached me, she approached a man, and one who, for the first time for many a day, was his own man.  She herself seemed wholly unconscious of anything of the kind.  As she drew nearer to me, and nearer, she appeared to be entirely oblivious of the fact that I was anything but the fibreless, emasculated creature which, up to that moment, she had made of me.

’But she knew it when she touched me,—­when she stooped to press her lips to mine.  At that instant the accumulating rage which had been smouldering in my breast through all those leaden torturing hours, sprang into flame.  Leaping off my couch of rugs, I flung my hands about her throat,—­and then she knew I was awake.  Then she strove to tighten the cord which she had suffered to become unduly loose.  Her baleful eyes were fixed on mine.  I knew that she was putting out her utmost force to trick me of my manhood.  But I fought with her like one possessed, and I conquered—­in a fashion.  I compressed her throat with my two hands as with an iron vice.  I knew that I was struggling for more than life, that the odds were all against me, that I was staking my all upon the casting of a die,—­I stuck at nothing which could make me victor.

’Tighter and tighter my pressure grew,—­I did not stay to think if I was killing her—­till on a sudden—­’

Mr Lessingham stopped.  He stared with fixed, glassy eyes, as if the whole was being re-enacted in front of him.  His voice faltered.  I thought he would break down.  But, with an effort, he continued.

’On a sudden, I felt her slipping from between my fingers.  Without the slightest warning, in an instant she had vanished, and where, not a moment before, she herself had been, I found myself confronting a monstrous beetle,—­a huge, writhing creation of some wild nightmare.

’At first the creature stood as high as I did.  But, as I stared at it, in stupefied amazement,—­as you may easily imagine,—­the thing dwindled while I gazed.  I did not stop to see how far the process of dwindling continued,—­a stark raving madman for the nonce, I fled as if all the fiends in hell were at my heels.’