For a moment he looked steadily at her.  He saw that the first glance has misled him; her face was not flushed with drink as he had supposed, but it was radiant with the most exquisite color, a red flame glowed and died on her cheek, and seemed to palpitate as she spoke.  The head was set on the neck nobly, as in a statue, and about the ears the bronze hair strayed into little curls.  She was smiling and waiting for his answer.

He muttered something about being very sorry, and fled down the hill out of the orgy, from the noise of roaring voices and the glitter of the great lamps very slowly swinging in the blast of wind.  He knew that he had touched the brink of utter desolation; there was death in the woman’s face, and she had indeed summoned him to the Sabbath.  Somehow he had been able to refuse on the instant, but if he had delayed he knew he would have abandoned himself to her, body and soul.  He locked himself in his room and lay trembling on the bed, wondering if some subtle sympathy had shown the woman her perfect companion.  He looked in the glass, not expecting now to see certain visible and outward signs, but searching for the meaning of that strange glance that lit up his eyes.  He had grown even thinner than before in the last few months, and his cheeks were wasted with hunger and sorrow, but there were still about his features the suggestion of a curious classic grace, and the look as of a faun who has strayed from the vineyards and olive gardens.  He had broken away, but now he felt the mesh of her net about him, a desire for her that was a madness, as if she held every nerve in his body and drew him to her, to her mystic world, to the rosebush where every flower was a flame.

He dreamed all night of the perilous things he had refused, and it was loss to awake in the morning, pain to return to the world.  The frost had broken and the fog had rolled away, and the grey street was filled with a clear grey light.  Again he looked out on the long dull sweep of the monotonous houses, hidden for the past weeks by a curtain of mist.  Heavy rain had fallen in the night, and the garden rails were still dripping, the roofs still dark with wet, all down the line the dingy white blinds were drawn in the upper windows.  Not a soul walked the street; every one was asleep after the exertions of the night before; even on the main road it was only at intervals that some straggler paddled by.  Presently a woman in a brown Ulster shuffled off on some errand, then a man in shirt-sleeves poked out his head, holding the door half-open, and stared up at a window opposite.  After a few minutes he slunk in again, and three loafers came slouching down the street, eager for mischief or beastliness of some sort.  They chose a house that seemed rather smarter than the rest, and, irritated by the neat curtains, the little grass plot with its dwarf shrub, one of the ruffians drew out a piece of chalk and wrote some words on the front door.  His friends kept watch