But as the night waned and the crowd thinned, he grew uneasy, and told the bar-keeper that assassins were on his track.

The bar-keeper told him to stay in the middle of the room, then, and not go near the door, or the window by the stove.

But a fatal fascination seduced him to the neighborhood of the stove every now and then, and repeatedly the bar-keeper brought him back to the middle of the room and warned him to remain there.

But he could not.

At three in the morning he again returned to the stove and sat down by a stranger.