She took a frantic step toward him. With a short cry of abject terror he fell along the floor, and gasped. It seemed to him that she had trampled the life out of his body.
She stood above him with a heaving bosom beneath her folded arms.
There was a long pause before he heard the door open. A weight seemed lifted off him. He found that he could breathe. In a few moments he ventured to raise his head. He saw a beautiful figure sitting at the desk writing. Even in the scratching of her pen along the paper there was a tone of tragedy.
He crawled backward upon his hands and knees, with his eyes furtively fixed upon that figure at the desk. If, when he had looked up he had found her standing with an arm outstretched tin the direction of the door, he felt that he would have been able to rise to his feet and leave her presence; but Mrs. Siddons' dramatic instinct caused her to produce a deeper impression upon him by simply treating him as if he were dead at her feet—as if she had, indeed, trampled the life out of his body.
He crept away slowly and painfully backward, until he was actually in the lobby. Then by a great effort he sprang to his feet, rushed headlong down the stairs, picked himself up in the hall, and fled wildly through the door, that chanced to be open, into the street. He overthrew a chairman in his wild flight, and as he turned the corner he went with a rush into the arms of a young man, who, with a few others by his side, was sauntering along.
“Zounds, sir! what do you mean by this mode of progression?” cried the young man, holding him fast.
Dionysius grasped him limply, looking at him with wild, staring eyes.