Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/183

Rh she remained silently looking in front of her, and as I began to perceive that any further prolongation of the scene could only be very painful and quite useless to both of us, I ' [I suddenly slipped a paragraph, catching only the word 'money.'] ' reviled me and flung it into my face with mad curses went away. After some moments' thought, I decided that my duty followed her  with a policeman I had happened to  to an arch under a railway-bridge, where the unhappy creature  approached and found that she was sunk in a stupor-like dream  and ultimately  hospital  comforts  died.'

Died.

I stood up with the letter in my hanging hand.

Nay, what was the meaning of all this?—I turned to the table.

How many apples were there on that plate? One, two, three, four, five, six.—I rent the letter into pieces. I strode across the room to the opened window: then looked back sharply, viciously, over my shoulder, almost expecting to see some one, some semi-human figure, with a cold smile on his cold face, behind me. Then the idea of Brooke, come from his grave to mock at me, seemed to cut my brain with a lash of madness. Then it was a loin-swathed, emaciate Christ that stood sardonically there in the shadow. I leaped fiercely to the place, and found that light and shade had tricked me.

Tricked me? Everything had tricked me! I was in a cave of trickery.

Then the realisation of what I had been reading came to me again, and with it the frantic suspicion of false play: I began thinking of my mother, taking my sufferings as being the shadow of hers, for she, too, surely had gone through all that I had. Suddenly an idea came to me that almost made me shriek out. '''At last, passing somewhat quickly into an alley, I met one face to face under a protruding shadowed lamp. For a moment I stood breathless, with my eyes in the mad wolfishness and glitter of hers, and then, like a lightning-flash that fills the whole air, terror of her filled me quite. I leaped aside,''