He stood as if turned to stone. All the blood in his body seemed to
be singing in his ears. His head was burning, the rest of him cold--cold
as ice. He would have moved to meet the advancing figure, but he could
not stir. He could only stop and listen to that maddening tarantella
beating out in his fevered brain.
"I say, you know--" the voice came to him out of an immensity of space,
as though uttered from another world--"it's a bit too chilly for this
sort of thing. Why didn't you put on an overcoat?"
A man's hand, strong and purposeful, closed upon his arm and impelled him
towards the house.
Piers went like an automaton, but he could not utter a word. His mouth
felt parched, his tongue powerless.
Avery! Avery! The woman he had wronged--the woman he worshipped so
madly--for whom his whole being mental and physical craved desperately,
yearning, unceasingly,--without whom he lived in a torture that was never
dormant! Avery! Avery! Was she lying dead behind that lighted window? If
so, if so, those six months of torment had been in vain. He would end his
misery swiftly and finally before it turned his brain.
Maxwell Wyndham was guiding him towards the conservatory where a dim
light shone. It was like an altar-flame in the darkness--that place where
first their lips had met. The memory of that night went through him like
a sword-thrust.
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