A shadow flickered over the face of the man who was lying there.
It was but momentary, but in that instant the watcher became cold. The silver of the candle-stick stung the palm of a hand which was suddenly wet.
This tranquil, lovely room with its soft yellow light, dissolved and shifted like a scene in a dream. . . .
. . . It was a raw winter's morning. The walls were the whitewashed walls of a prison mortuary. There was a smell of chloride of lime. . . .
And lying upon a long zinc slab, with little grooves and depressions running down to the eye-hole of a drain, was a still figure whose face was a ghastly caricature of this face, hideously, revoltingly alike . . .
Mary Lothian, Tumpany, and two maid-servants came into the room, and with some difficulty the poet was carried upstairs.
He was hardly laid upon his bed when the rain came, falling in great sheets with a loud noise, cooling and purging the hot air.
CHAPTER III
PSYCHOLOGY OF THE INEBRIATE, AND THE LETTER OF JEWELLED WORDS