came again to Valentine a growing sense of anxiety. At first he fought
against it as most men, perhaps out of self-respect, fight against the
entrance of fear into their souls. Then he yielded to it, and let it
crawl over him, as the sea crawls over flat sands. And the sea left no
inch of sand uncovered. Every cranny of Valentine's soul was flooded.
There was no part of it which did not shudder with apprehension. And
outwards flowed this invisible, unmurmuring tide, devouring his body,
till the sweat was upon his face and his strained hands and trembling
fingers were cold like ice, and his knees fluttered as the knees of
palsied age, and his teeth clicked, row against row, and his hairs
stirred, and his head, under its thatch, tingled and burned and throbbed.
Every faculty, too, seemed to stand straight up like a sentinel at its
post, staring into dust clouds through which rode an approaching enemy.
Eyes watched, ears listened, brain was hideously alert. The whole body
kept itself tense, stiff, wary. For Valentine had a secret conviction
at this moment that he was about to be attacked. By what? He was hardly
master of himself enough to wonder. His thoughts no longer ran free.
They crept like paralyzed things about his mind, and that despite the
unnatural vitality of his brain. It was as if he thought intensely,
violently, and yet could not think at all, as a man terrified may stare
with wide open eyes and yet perceive nothing, lacking for a moment the
faculty of perceiving. So Valentine waited, like some blind man with
glaring eyeballs. And then, passing into another stage of sensation, he
found himself vehemently and rapidly discussing possibilities of terror,
forming mental pictures of all the things, of all the powers, that we
cannot see. He embodied, materialized, the wind, the voice of the sea,
the angry, hot scent of certain flowers, of the white lily, the tuberose,
the hyacinth. He created figures for light, for darkness, for a wail, for
a laugh, and set them in array all around him in the blackness. But none
of these imagined figures could cause the horror which he felt. He drove