ing on
all this wicked city. He had tried to save her from it, but he had
failed. What could he do now? He felt a desire to do something, something
else, something extraordinary.

Sitting on the end of the bed he began again to recall Glory's face as he
had seen it at the race-course. And now it came to him as a shock after
his visions of her early girlhood. He thought there was a certain
vulgarity in it which, he had not observed before--a slight coarsening of
its expression, an indescribable degeneracy even under the glow of its
developed beauty. With her full red lips and curving throat and dancing
eyes, she was smiling into the face of the man who was sitting by her
side. Her smile was a significant smile, and the bright and eager look
with which the man answered it was as full of meaning. He could read
their thoughts. What had happened? Were all barriers broken down? Was
everything understood between them?

This was the final madness, and he leaped to his feet in an outburst of
uncontrollable rage. All at once he shuddered with a feeling that
something terrible was brewing within him. He felt cold, a shiver was
running over his whole body. But the thought he had been in search of had
come to him of itself. It came first as a shock, and with a sense of
indescribable dread, but it had taken hold of him and hurried him away.
He had remembered his text: "Deliver him up to Satan for the destruction
of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord."

"Why not?" he thought; "it is in the Holy Book itself. There is the
authority of St. Paul for it. Clearly the early Christians countenanced
and practised such things." But then came a spasm of physical pain. That
beautiful life, so full of love and loveliness, radiating joy and
sweetness and charm! The thing was impossible! It was monstrous! "Am I
going mad?" he asked himself.

And then he began to be sorry for himself as well as for Glory. How could
he live in the world without her? Although he had lost her, although an
impassable gulf divided them, although he had not seen her for six months
until today, yet it was something to know she was alive and that he could
go at night to the place where she was and look up and think, "She is
there." "It is true, I am going mad," he thought, and he trembled again.

His mind oscillated among these conflicting ideas, until the more hideous
thought returned to him of Drake and the smile exchanged with Glory. Then