in the intolerable book
of the Past. Of all its sorrows and failures, its frantic follies and its
besotted sins. Memory omitted nothing. Not a blot upon those sordid pages
was spared him. It was not possible for an instant to turn away his eyes.
His mental clarity was unrelieved by weariness. No shadow dimmed the keen
crystal of his brain. He was at tension, like a bowstring that is
stretched continually. He realised this, thinking: "Presently I will cut
the bow-string, and the bow shall have rest! Even if my once-boasted
will-power reasserted itself--even if I rose triumphant for the second
time, cured of my vile craving, I do not the less owe my debt to the woman
I have married. I promised her that I would die rather than fail her. I
failed her! There is no excuse!"

LXXIII

The West End pavements were shining wet. Belated cabs spun homewards with
sleepy revellers. Neat motor-broughams slid between the kerbs and rounded
corners at unrebuked excess-speeds, winking their blazing head-lights at
drowsy policemen muffled in oilskin capes. On all these accustomed things
the blue-white arc-lights shone.

The most belated of all the hansom cabs in London stopped at the door of
the house in Harley Street as the narrow strip of sky between the grim,
drab-faced houses began to be dappled with the leaden grey of dawn. A
faint moon reeled northwards, hunted by sable shapes of screaming terror,
pale Venus clinging to her tattered robe. The house was all black and
silent, a dead face with blinded windows. Did Saxham wake behind them? Or
did he sleep, not to wake again?

Lynette tried her latchkey. The unchained door swung backwards. She passed
into the house silently, a tall, slender shape. A light was shining under
the consulting-room door. Her heart leaped to greet it. She kissed her
hand to it, and turned, moving noiselessly, and put up the chain of the
hall-door. She felt for the switch of the electric light, and snapped it
on.

She was jarred and aching and weary with her journey; but it was a very
fair woman whom she saw reflected in the hall-mirror as she unpinned her
hat and tossed it upon the hall-table, and passed on to the
consulting-room door--a woman whose face was strange to herself, with that
new fire, and decision, and strength of purpose in it; a woman with
glowing roses of colour in her cheeks, and eager, shining eyes.

All through the long hours of the journey she had pictured him, her
husband, ben