necessary. "You did n't hurt your shoulder, did you?" she asked anxiously. He did not know--it did not much matter. Had Hamilton actually succeeded in reaching her lips, he would have torn his wounded arm from the bandages and struck with that too. He had never realized until then what sacred things her lips were. He had known them only as beautiful. They were beautiful now as he looked down at them. Slightly parted, they held his eyes with a strange, new fascination. They were alive, those lips. They were warm and pulsating. He found himself breathing faster because of them. He seemed, against his will, to be bending toward them. Then, with a wrench, he tore himself free from the spell, not daring to look at her again. Leaving her to Marie at the door of her room, Monte went into his own apartment. He threw open a window, and stood there in the dark with the cool night breeze blowing in upon him. After Maxim's, the more clean air the better; after what had followed in the cab, the more cool air the better. He was still confused by it; still frightened by it. For a moment he had felt himself caught in the clutch of some power over which he had no control. That was the startling truth that stood out most prominently. He had been like one intoxicated--he who never before in his life had lost a grip upon himself. That fact struck at the very heart of his whole philosophy of life. Always normal--that had been his boast; never losing his head over this thing or that. It was the only way a man could keep from worrying. It was the only way a man could keep sane. The moment you wanted anything like the devil, then the devil was to pay. This evening he had proved that. He went back to the affair at Maxim's. He should have known better than to take her there, anyway. She did not belong in such a place. She did not belong anywhere he had taken her to-day. To-morrow--but all this was beside the point. The question that he would most like to answer at this moment was whether this last wild episode of Hamilton's was due to absinthe or to that same weird passion which a few weeks before had led the man to shoot. It had been beastly of Hamilton to try to reach her lips. That, doubtless, was the absinthe. It robbed him of his senses. But the look in the man's eyes when he sang, the awful hunger that burned in them when he gave his mad toast--those things seemed to spring from a different source. The man, in a room full of strangers, had seen only her, had sung only to her. Monte doubted if the crazed fellow saw even him. He saw no one but this one woman. That was madness--but it did not come of absinthe. The absinthe may have caused the final utter breakdown of Hamilton's self-control here and at Madame Courcy's--but that the desire could be there without it Monte had twice proved to himself that evening.