He hated them because they could not by any possibility comprehend
his magnificent separation, his starry sanity, his kinship with the
gods. And he had a new thirst to obliterate the whole creeping race of
dust-dwellers with one wide, incomparably bloody gesture.
It was late when he found himself back again before the house, and an
ink-black cloud touched the moon's edge. After the airless evening a
wind had sprang up in the east; it thrashed among the lilac-stems as he
came through them and across the turf, silent-footed as an Indian. In
his right hand he had a bread-knife, held butt to thumb, dagger-wise.
Where he had come by the rust-bitten thing no one knows, least of all
himself. In the broken light his eyes shone with a curious luminosity of
their own, absorbed, introspective.
All the windows were dark, and the entrance-hall, when he slipped in
between the pillars, but across its floor he saw light thrown in a
yellow ribbon from the half-closed door of the drawing-room.
It took his attention, laid hands on his imagination. He began to
struggle against it.
He would _not_ go into that room. He was going to another room. To stay
him, he made a picture of the other room in his tumbled mind--the high,
bleak walls, the bureau with the three candles burning wanly, the bed,
the face of the man on the bed. And when his rebellious feet,
surrendering him up to the lure of that beckoning ribbon, had edged as
far as the door, and he had pushed it a little further ajar to get his
head in, he saw that the face itself was there in the drawing-room.
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