Page:Possession (1926).pdf/362

 who was not there at all. . . a dark man of whose very existence Hattie Tolliver had never heard. 

EANWHILE in the front of the concert hall a little man whom none of them had seen slipped away before the lights came up, into the protecting darkness of the street. He had come in late to sit far back in the shadow beneath the balcony. Rebecca had noticed him, for he sat almost beside her and behaved in a queer fashion; but never having seen him before, she gave the matter no further thought. In the midst of the concert he had suddenly begun to weep, snuffling and drying his eyes with a furtive shame. He was a small man with a sallow face and shifting eyes which looked at you in a trembling, apologetic fashion (a trick that had come over him in the years since he had been driven from the comfortable flat on the top floor of the Babylon Arms). Rebecca, of course, had never heard of Mr. Wyck, yet she noticed him now because he fidgeted with his umbrella and because his hands trembled violently when he held his handkerchief to his eyes. He appeared, in his sniveling, frightened way, to be deeply affected by the music.

He went out quickly, among the first, looking behind him as if he stood in terror of being recognized and accused before all those people. Once in the street, he drew his shabby overcoat close about him, and turned his steps southward with such speed that at times the passers-by glared at him for jostling them at the crossings. They must have thought too, when he looked at them, that there was a reflection of madness in the staring eyes. He plunged south into the glare of light that pierced the darkness above Broadway like a pillar of fire.

He had seen her again. . . the one woman whom he hated above all persons on earth. He would have killed her. It would have given him pleasure to see her die, but as he ran, he knew that