course--but a course fairly prickling with new
sensations--until he stood before one of the popular cafes, now
effervescing with sprightly life. He paused here a moment to listen to
the music. A group of well-groomed men and women laughingly clambered
out of a big touring car and passed in before the obsequious attendants.
He watched them with some envy. Music, good food, good wines, laughter,
and bright eyes--the flimsiest vanities of life to be sure--and yet there
was something in his hungry heart that craved them all. Well, ten years
from now perhaps,--his hand fell upon the vial. No. Not ten years from
now, but to-morrow, even tomorrow, he might claim these luxuries!

He jumped on a car and in thirty minutes stood in the lean, quiet street
into which for three years he had stared from his third floor room.
These quarters seemed now more than ever a parody on home. This row of
genteel structures which had degenerated into boarding houses for the
indigent and struggling younger generation, and the wrecks of the past,
embodied, in even the blank stare of their exteriors, stupid mediocrity.
He fumbled nervously in his pocket for his latch-key, and opening the
door climbed the three stale flights to his room. He lighted both
gas-jets, but even then the gloom remained. He craved more light--the
dazzling light of arc-lamps, the glare reflected from polished mirrors.
Better absolute darkness than this. He turned out the gas and throwing
open his window leaned far out over the sill. Then he concentrated his
thoughts upon the issue confronting him.

At the end of other colorless days, when he had come back here only to be
tortured by the stretch of gray road before him, he had considered as a
possibility that which now was almost a reality. He had always been
checked by this desire to have first his taste of life and by the
troublesome conviction that there was something unfair about seizing it
in this way. Furthermore, though he could, without Barstow's discovery,
have lived his week and closed it by any one of a dozen effective means,
he realized that he could not trust even himself to fulfill at the
end--no matter how binding the oath--so fearful a decree. A few deep
draughts of joyous life might turn his head. It was as dangerous an
experiment as taking the first smoke of opium, as tampering with the
first injection of morphine, upon the promise of stopping there. No,
before beginning he must set at work s