d into whose regions
he was ever more deeply passing, sentences, vague, without human
agency, accusing Martin of sins and infidelities and riotous living.
Sometimes he was tempted to go further into this and challenge Martin's
accusers, but fear held him back. Martin had been a good son since his
return to England, yes, he had, and he had forsaken his evil ways and
was going to be with his father now until the end, his last refuge
against loneliness. Every one else had left him or was leaving him, but
Martin was there. Martin hadn't deceived him, Martin was a good boy ...
a good boy ... and then, as it seemed to him, with Martin's hand in his
own he would pass off into his world of strange dreams and desperate
prayer and hours of waiting, listening, straining for a voice ...

During that last night before New Year's Eve an hour came to him when
he seemed to be left utterly alone. Exhausted, faint, dizzy with want
of sleep and food, he knelt before his bed; his room seemed to be
filled with devils, taunting him, tempting him, bewildering and
blinding him. He rose suddenly in a frenzy, striking out, rushing about
his room, crying ... then at last, exhausted, creeping back to his bed,
falling down upon it and sinking into a long dreamless sleep.

They found him sleeping when they came to call him and they left him.
He did not wake until the early afternoon; his brain seemed clear and
his body so weak that it was with the greatest difficulty that he
washed and put on some clothes.

The room was dark with the fog; lamps in the street below glimmered
uncertainly, and voices and the traffic of the street were muffled. He
opened his door and, looking out, heard in the room below Martin's
voice raised excitedly. Slowly he went down to meet him.

Martin also had reached, on that last day of the year, the very end of
his tether. During the last ten days he had been fighting against every
weakness to which his character was susceptible. With the New Year he
felt that everything would be well; he could draw a new breath then,
find work somewhere away from London, have Maggie perhaps with him, and
drive a way out of all the tangle of his perplexities. But even then he
did not dare to face the future thoroughly. Would his father let him
go? Was he, after all his struggles, to give way and ruin Maggie's
position and future? Could he be sure, if he look her away with him,
that then he would keep straight, and that his old temptations