Again the doctor's eyes blazed with wrath and he completely lost his self-control.
"Damn you, have I asked for your help or patronage? Its offer is an insult! I want you to remember, sir, that I picked you up out of the streets of New York, ill, hungry, out of work, friendless, and gave you your first job."
Bivens, breathing heavily, turned in silence and hurried to the door. The doctor followed.
With his hand on the knob, the financier turned, his face black with hate and slowly said:
"I'll make you live to regret this interview, Woodman!"
With a contemptuous grunt, the doctor closed the door.
CHAPTER VII
A VISION
When Stuart heard the door close and Bivens's step die away on the pavement below, he came down to see the doctor, haunted by a strange vision. Through every day of his subsequent life the most trivial details of that hour stood out in his memory with peculiar and terrible vividness. From every shadow he saw Nan's face looking into his. He was not superstitious; this impression he knew was simply a picture burned into his tired brain by days and nights of intense longing. But what increased the horror of the fancy was the fact that the picture changed in quick succession, from the face of the living to the face of the dead. He closed his eyes at last and in sheer desperation felt his way down the last flight of stairs. The fiercer the effort he made to shut out the picture, the more vivid it became until he found himself shivering over the last persistent outline which refused to vanish at any command of his will. It was the ghost of Nan's face—old, white, pulseless, terrible in its beauty, but dead.