Now he could cry. He cried tears that came from the deepest parts of him. It was like a convulsion, a hemorrhage of tears, and the fluids ran from his nose and from his eyes, they rose in him from every corner of his heart. He made no attempt to silence himself, or to stifle this flow. He even encouraged it. He found sorrows hidden deep in the bowels of his memory and of his spirit, agonies he had never known existed. And he dredged them up from all these inside crevices and paraded them before the eye of his mind. Every image that hovered there, even for an instant—not only of Echo, Annabel, Shirley, Bernice, Berry-berry, Ralph, of the invisible little Willy—but of any face he could remember from casual encounters on streetcars, in drugstores, in crowds, even those of dream-people from other ages, other countries—each of them brought forth a new torrent of these profound waters of his sorrow. His lungs pressed against his heart, his stomach twisted and convulsed itself; and the pain became physical as he cried for all the dead children, transmuted, newly become adults, who had flown from the invisible stranger who shook the high branches of all the apple trees in all the orchards of the world.

Now this return to physical pain, this sense of weariness, emptiness, weakness of body, came to him like a sweet breeze to a soul in Purgatory: the gates swayed gently open and he drifted easily into sleep. It was like freedom.

Berry-berry was the first to awaken. In his restless sleep he had moved so close to the edge of the bed that he was virtually hanging there in such precarious imbalance that a sharp sense of falling from some great height brought him with a shock of fear to full wakefulness. He opened his eyes to the daylight that touched the floor. This gave him a momentary sense of physical safety, but it was followed too quickly by a memory of all that had taken place on the previous day. He forced his eyes to close and tried to will himself back to unconsciousness. But his body resisted these efforts: there was a dull pain at the base of his skull, his mouth and throat were unbearably dry. These residual effects of heavy drinking were too familiar to allow him to pretend for long that sleep might, by some miracle, return to him.

In one last futile effort against these odds, he turned to lie flat on his back; it was then that he saw Clinton, slumped awkwardly in the chair, still fast asleep.