Most of that daft night-running will always be blank in Christopher's
mind; moments and moments, like islands of clarity, remain. He brings
back one vivid interval when he found himself seated on his father's
gravestone among the whispering grasses, staring down into the pallid
bowl of the world. And in that moment he knew what Daniel Kain had felt,
and Maynard Kain before him; a passionate and contemptuous hatred for
all the dullards in the world who never dreamed dreams or saw visions or
sang wordless songs or ran naked-hearted in the flood of the full-blown
moon. 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