nothing to do with it, his will was powerless. He was betrayed like a
fortified city whose gate had been thrown open by an unsuspected, a
concealed, traitor inside. In an instant he had been invaded, his being
levelled, his peculiar pride overthrown. He thought even that he heard a
dull crash, as if something paramount had irremediably fallen,
something that should have been maintained at any cost, until the end of
life.

Howat felt a sudden hatred of his companion; but that quickly
evaporated; he discovered that she had spread, like a drop of carmine in
a goblet of water, through his every nerve. By God, but she had become
himself! In the space of a breath she was in his blood, in his brain;
calling his hands about her, toward her smooth, beautiful arms. She was
the scent in his nostrils, the sound a breeze newly sprung up stirred
out of the leaves. A profound melancholy spread over him, a deep
sadness, a conviction of loss. Ludowika was singing softly:

"Last Sunday at St. James's prayers
--dressed in all my whalebone airs."

He had come on disaster. The realization flashed through his
consciousness and was engulfed in the submerging of his being in the
overwhelming, stinging blood that had swept him from his old security.
Yet he had been so detached from the merging influences about him, his
organization had been so complete in its isolation, his egotism so
developed, that a last trace of his entity lingered sentient, viewing as
if from a careened but still tenable deck the general submergence. His
thoughts returned to the automatic operation of the consummation
obliterating his person, the inexorable blind movement of the thing in
which he had been caught, dragged into the maw of a supreme purpose. It