er having seen him, he had tried to
lose himself in a plunge into deep and turbid enough waters; but he
found that he had even lost the taste of high flavours, for which he
had once had an epicurean palate. The effort had ended in his being
overpowered again by his horrors--the horrors in which he found himself
staring at that end of things when no pleasure had spice, no debauchery
the sting of life, and men, such as he, stood upon the shore of time
shuddering and naked souls, watching the great tide, bearing its
treasures, recede forever, and leave them to the cold and hideous dark.
During one day of his stay in town he had seen Teresita, who had at
first stared half frightened by the change she saw in him, and then had
told him truths he could have wrung her neck for putting into words.

"You look an old man," she said, with the foreign accent he had once
found deliciously amusing, but which now seemed to add a sting. "And
somesing is eating you op. You are mad in lofe with some beautiful one
who will not look at you. I haf seen it in mans before. It is she who
eats you op--your evil thinkings of her. It serve you right. Your eyes
look mad."

He himself, at times, suspected that they did, and cursed himself
because he could not keep cool. It was part of his horrors that he knew
his internal furies were worse than folly, and yet he could not restrain
them. The creeping suspicion that this was only the result of the simple
fact that he had never tried to restrain any tendency of his own was
maddening. His nervous system was a wreck. He drank a great deal of
whisky to keep himself "straight" during the day, and he rose many times
during his black waking hours in the night to drink more because he
obstinately refused to give up the hope that, if he drank enough, it
would make him sleep. As through the thoughts of Mount Dunstan, who was
a clean and healthy human being, there ran one thread which would not
disentangle itself, so there ran through his unwholesome thinking a
thread which burned like fire. His secret ravings would not have been
good to hear. His passion was more than half hatred, and a desire for
vengeance, for the chance to re-assert his own power, to prove himself
master, to get the better in one way or another of this arrogant young
outsider and her high-handed pride. The condition of his mind was so far
from normal that he failed to see that the things he said to himself,
the plans he laid, were grotesque