168 The Light That Failed at all well, though you mayn’t know it. You’re as jumpy asiancatey “I reform tomorrow. Good-night.” As he repassed through the studio, Torpenhow lifted the cloth above the picture, and almost betrayed himself by outcries: “Wiped out! — scraped out and turped out! He’s on the verge of jumps as it is. That’s Bess, — the little fiend! Only a woman could have done that!with the ink not dry on the check, too! Dick will be raving mad tomorrow. It was all my fault for trying to help gutter-devils. Oh, my poor Dick, the Lord is hitting you very hard!” Dick could not sleep that night, partly for pure joy, and partly because the well-known Catherine-wheels inside his eyes had given place to crackling volcanoes of many-colored fire. “Spout away,” he said aloud. “I’ve done my work, and now you can do what you please.” He lay still, staring at the ceiling, the long-pent-up delirium of drink in his veins, his brain on fire with racing thoughts that would not stay to be considered, and his hands crisped and dry. He had just discovered that he was painting the face of the Melancholia on a revolving dome ribbed with millions of lights, and that all his wondrous thoughts stood embodied hundreds of feet below his tiny swinging plank, shouting together in his honor, when something cracked inside his temples like an overstrained bowstring, the glittering dome broke inward, and he was alone in the thick night. “Pll go to sleep. The room’s very dark. Let’s light a lamp and see how the Melancholia looks. There ought to have been a moon.” It was then that Torpenhow heard his name called by a voice that he did not know, — in the rattling accents of deadly fear. “He’s looked at the picture,” was his first thought,