ys had
cut deep. His life had been turned upside down. All his predispositions
had been suddenly brought to check, his habits turned upon the flank and
routed, his mental postures flung into confusion. He had to start life
again; but it could not be in the way of any previous travel of mind or
body. The line of cleavage was sharp and wide, and the only connection
with the past was in the long-reaching influence of evil habits, which
crept from their coverts, now and again, to mock him as his old self
had mocked life--to mock him and to tempt him. Through seven months of
healthy life for his body, while brain and will were sleeping, the whole
man had made long strides towards recreation. But with the renewal of
will and mind the old weaknesses, roused by memory, began to emerge
intermittently, as water rises from a spring. There was something
terrible in this repetition of sensation--the law of habit answering
to the machine-like throbbing of memory, as, a kaleidoscope turning,
turning, its pictures pass a certain point at fixed intervals--an
automatic recurrence. He found himself at times touching his lips with
his tongue, and with this act came the dry throat, the hot eye, the
restless hand feeling for a glass that eluded his fingers.

Twice in one week did this fever surge up in him, and it caught him
in those moments when, exhausted by the struggle of his mind to adapt
itself to the new conditions, his senses were delicately susceptible.
Visions of Jolicoeur's saloon came to his mind's eye. With a singular
separateness, a new-developed dual sense, he saw himself standing in the
summer heat, looking over to the cool dark doorway of the saloon, and
he caught again the smell of the fresh-drawn beer. He was conscious
of watching himself do this and that, of seeing himself move here and
there. He began to look upon Charley Steele as a man he had known--he,
Charles Mallard, had known--while he had to suffer for what Charley
Steele had done. Then, all at once, as he was thinking and dreaming and
seeing, there would seize upon him the old appetite, coincident with the
seizure of his brain by the old sense of cynicism at its worst--such a
worst as had made him insult Jake Hough when the rough countryman was
ready to take his part that wild night at the Cote Dorion.

At such moments life became a conflict--almost a terror--for as yet he
had not swung into line with the new order of things. In truth, there
was no order of thin