His thoughts focused themselves mechanically upon the white lips of the man on the bed and upon his wrinkled eyelids, but they were no longer occupied with these things. His mind reviewed the loss of his life-illusion. How many chances and casualties, how many little crisscross patterns, puffs of aimless air, wandering shadows, unpredictable wind-ripples, had combined to disintegrate and destroy it!

“I must not let slip what I found out just now,” he thought. And then, as a triangle of tiny wrinkles upon one of Mr. Malakite’s closed eyes wove itself into his mental process, “Whatever,” he said to himself, “Christie may feel, I know that she, and no other, is my real truelove! Yes, by God! And I know that my ‘I am I’ is no ‘hard, small crystal’ inside me, but a cloud, a vapour, a mist, a smoke, hovering round my skull, hovering round my spine, my arms, my legs! That’s what I am ⁠—a ‘vegetable-animal’ wrapped in a mental cloud, and with the willpower to project this cloud into the consciousness of others!”