returned to Genevieve and to my dear Boris with a heart washed clean by
the tempests of the night.

Never in word or deed or thought while with them had I betrayed my sorrow
even to myself.

The mask of self-deception was no longer a mask for me, it was a part of
me. Night lifted it, laying bare the stifled truth below; but there was
no one to see except myself, and when the day broke the mask fell back
again of its own accord. These thoughts passed through my troubled mind
as I lay sick, but they were hopelessly entangled with visions of white
creatures, heavy as stone, crawling about in Boris' basin,--of the wolf's
head on the rug, foaming and snapping at Genevieve, who lay smiling
beside it. I thought, too, of the King in Yellow wrapped in the fantastic
colours of his tattered mantle, and that bitter cry of Cassilda, "Not
upon us, oh King, not upon us!" Feverishly I struggled to put it from me,
but I saw the lake of Hali, thin and blank, without a ripple or wind to
stir it, and I saw the towers of Carcosa behind the moon. Aldebaran, the
Hyades, Alar, Hastur, glided through the cloud-rifts which fluttered and
flapped as they passed like the scolloped tatters of the King in Yellow.
Among all these, one sane thought persisted. It never wavered, no matter
what else was going on in my disordered mind, that my chief reason for
existing was to meet some requirement of Boris and Genevieve. What this
obligation was, its nature, was never clear; sometimes it seemed to be
protection, sometimes support, through a great crisis. Whatever it seemed
to be for the time, its weight rested only on me, and I was never so ill
or so weak that I did not respond with my whole soul. There were always
crowds of faces about me, mostly strange, but a few I recognized, Boris
among them. Afterward they told me that this could not have been, but I
know that once at least he bent over me. It was only a touch, a faint