Silently they
burned, and fluttered upward noiselessly. He saw them move this way and
that. Some leaped up; others bent sideways; others wavered uncertainly,
as if their desire were incomplete and their intention undecided. The
doctor stared upon them, and listened for the chorus that fires sing
to tremble and to murmur from their lips. Yet they sang no chorus, but
always, in a ghostly silence, aspired around him. He knew himself to be
the victim of a delusion. He knew what he would have said to a patient
seeking his aid against such a deception of the senses. In his common
sense he knew this, and yet he gradually lost the notion that he was
being deceived, and allowed himself to drift, as he had seen others
drift, into the fancy that he was holding strange intercourse with the
actual. These flames were real. They had forms. They moved. They enclosed
him in a circle. They embraced him. As he watched them he fancied that
they longed to be near to him, and--and--yes--so ran his thoughts--to
communicate something to him, to sigh out their fiery hearts on his. They
trembled as if convulsed with emotion, with desire. They tried to escape
from the sinister red background that held them in its grasp as in a
leash.
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