lory in his narration, boasting and swearing what he
would do when he would return to the old scenes, how happy and
triumphant he had been in the midst of his filth--but young and
ignorant though she was she saw beneath this the misery, the shame, the
bitterness, the ignominy. He was down in the dust, in a despair furious
and more self-accusing than anything of which she had ever conceived.

Again and again, too, although this was never deliberately stated, she
saw that he spoke like a man caught in a trap. He did not blame any one
but himself for the catastrophe of his life, but he often spoke, in
spite of himself, like a man who from the very beginning had been under
some occult influence. He never alluded now to his early days but she
remembered how he had once told her that that "Religion" had "got" him
from the very beginning, and had weighted all the scales against him.
It was as though he had said: "I was told from the very beginning that
I was to be made a fighting-ground of. I didn't want to be that. I
wasn't the man for that. I was chosen wrongly."

He only once made any allusion to his father's death, but Maggie very
soon discovered that that was never away from his mind. "I loved my
father and I killed him," he said one day, "so I thought it wise not to
love any one again."

Gradually a picture was created in Maggie's mind, a picture originating
in that dirty, dark room where they were. She saw many foreign
countries and many foreign towns, and in all of them men and women were
evil. The towns were always in the hour between daylight and dark, the
streets twisted and obscure, the inhabitants furtive and sinister.

The things that those inhabitants did were made quite plain to her. She
saw the dancing saloons, the women naked and laughing, the men drunken
and besotted, the gambling, the quarrelling, drugging, suicide--all
under a half-dead sky, stinking and offensive.

One day, at last, she laughed.

"Martin," she cried, "don't let's be so serious about it. You can't
want to go back to that life--it's so dull. At first I was frightened,
but now!--why it's all the same thing over and over again."

"I'm only telling you," he said; "I don't say that I do want to go back
again. I don't want anything except for you to go away. I just want to
go to hell my own fashion."

"You talk so much about going to hell," she said. "Why, for ten days
now you've spoken of nothing else. There are other places, you know."