Abruptly he lifted up his head. The sun was so low now that he could look straight into its great red circle suspended above the roofs of the town. It resembled, as he looked at it, a vast fiery tunnel, the mouth of some colossal piece of artillery, directed full against him. With screwed-up eyelids he returned the stare of this bloodred cannon-mouth; and as he fronted it, it seemed to him that a dusky figure took shape within it, a figure resembling Jason Otter’s abominable idol.

There was something so atrocious in the idea of this dusky demon being there at all⁠—being, so to say, the great orb’s final expression as it went down⁠—that he leaped to his feet in indignant protest. His movement brought the blood from his head, and the phantasm vanished. Slowly and inevitably, with a visible sliding descent, the red globe sank out of sight; and Wolf picked up his hat and stick. “It must be long after eight,” he thought. “I must get home to Gerda.”