A man Bobby had never seen before followed her to the table. His middle-aged figure was loudly clothed. His
face was coarse and clean shaven. He acknowledged the introductions sullenly.
"I've only a minute," Bobby said to Maria.
He continued, however, to raise his glass indifferently to his lips. All at once his glass shook. Maria's dark and
sparkling face became blurred. He could no longer define the features of the stranger. He had never before
experienced anything of the kind. He tried to account for it, but his mind became confused.
"Maria!" he burst out. "Why are you looking at me like that?"
Her contralto laugh rippled.
"Bobby looks so funny! Carlos! Leetle Bobby looks so queer! What is the matter with him?"
Bobby's anger was lost in the increased confusion of his senses, but through that mental turmoil tore the
thought of Graham and his intention of going to the Cedars. With shaking fingers he dragged out his watch.
He couldn't read the dial. He braced his hands against the table, thrust back his chair, and arose. The room
tumbled about him. Before his eyes the dancers made long nebulous bands of colour in which nothing had
form or coherence. Instinctively he felt he hadn't dined recklessly enough to account for these amazing
symptoms. He was suddenly afraid.
"Carlos!" he whispered.
He heard Maria's voice dimly:
"Take him home."
A hand touched his arm. With a supreme effort of will he walked from the room, guided by the hand on his
arm. And always his brain recorded fewer and fewer impressions for his memory to struggle with later.
At the cloak room some one helped him put on his coat. He was walking down steps. He was in some kind of
a conveyance. He didn't know what it was. An automobile, a carriage, a train? He didn't know. He only
understood that it went swiftly, swaying from side to side through a sable pit. Whenever his mind moved at all
it came back to that sensation of a black pit in which he remained suspended, swinging from side to side,
trying to struggle up against impossible odds. Once or twice words flashed like fire through the pit:
"Tyrant!--Fool to go."
From a long immersion deeper in the pit he struggled frantically. He must get out. Somehow he must find
wings. He realized that his eyes were closed. He tried to open them and failed. So the pit persisted and he
surrendered himself, as one accepts death, to its hateful blackness.
Abruptly he experienced a momentary release. There was no more swaying, no more movement of any kind.
He heard a strange, melancholy voice, whispering without words, always whispering with a futile
perseverance as if it wished him to understand something it could not express.
"What is it trying to tell me?" he asked himself.
Then he understood. It was the voice of the wind, and it tried to tell him to open his eyes, and he found that he
could. But in spite of his desire they closed again almost immediately. Yet, from that swift glimpse, a picture
outlined itself later in his memory.