His wife and his two children were also removed from the dangerous house, before which the bomb-throwers were to gather upon the following day.
While the lights were burning in the palace, and courteous, familiar faces were bowing to him, smiling and expressing their concern, the dignitary experienced a sensation of pleasant excitement--he felt as if he had already received, or was soon to receive, some great and unexpected reward.

But the people went away, the lights were extinguished, and through the mirrors, the lace-like and fantastic reflection of the electric lamps on the street, quivered across the ceiling and over the walls.

A stranger in the house, with its paintings, its statues and its silence, the light--itself silent and indefinite--awakened painful thoughts in him as to the vanity of bolts and guards and walls.

And then, in the dead of night, in the silence and solitude of a strange bedroom, a sensation of unbearable fear swept over the dignitary.
He had some kidney trouble, and whenever he grew strongly agitated, his face, his hands and his feet became swollen.

Now, rising like a mountain of bloated flesh above the taut springs of the bed, he felt, with the anguish of a sick man, his swollen face, which seemed to him to belong to some one else.