At this day he could shut his eyes and summon back with distinctness the smallest detail of the interview.

He went over again his tedious wait in the outer office--the scattered magazines upon the table, the utterly inartistic prints upon the wall, the ticking of the tall bronze clock on the mantel, and even the number of the page he had been reading in a periodical, for--following a methodical habit--he had unconsciously made a mental note of the figures when he laid the magazine aside to face the examination behind the folding doors.

With the patient attention to minutia which was a part of his literary instinct, his memory followed the great man across the ugly yellow squares in the carpet and fixed itself upon a row of small green bottles standing in a wooden rack upon the table.

Through the half hour of his visit, which brief as it was casually dismissed him to his death, those slender green phials seemed to his fancy to hold an absurd and grotesque prominence.

"In a climate like this I'd give you three years--maybe a little longer--yes, I think I may grant a little longer," the great man had remarked, with what seemed to Adams a ridiculous assumption of yielding a concession.