He saw clearly too his own futile isolation. He had not gone one step
nearer the lives he had sought to approach nor bridged the restless
shame and rancour that had divided him from mother and brother and
sister. He felt that he was hardly of the one blood with them but stood
to them rather in the mystical kinship of fosterage, fosterchild and
fosterbrother.

He turned to appease the fierce longings of his heart before which
everything else was idle and alien. He cared little that he was in
mortal sin, that his life had grown to be a tissue of subterfuge and
falsehood. Beside the savage desire within him to realize the
enormities which he brooded on nothing was sacred. He bore cynically
with the shameful details of his secret riots in which he exulted to
defile with patience whatever image had attracted his eyes. By day and
by night he moved among distorted images of the outer world. A figure
that had seemed to him by day demure and innocent came towards him by
night through the winding darkness of sleep, her face transfigured by a
lecherous cunning, her eyes bright with brutish joy. Only the morning
pained him with its dim memory of dark orgiastic riot, its keen and
humiliating sense of transgression.

He returned to his wanderings. The veiled autumnal evenings led him
from street to street as they had led him years before along the quiet
avenues of Blackrock. But no vision of trim front gardens or of kindly
lights in the windows poured a tender influence upon him now. Only at
times, in the pauses of his desire, when the luxury that was wasting
him gave room to a softer languor, the image of Mercedes traversed the
background of his memory. He saw again the small white house and the
garden of rose-bushes on the road that led to the mountains and he
remembered the sadly proud gesture of refusal which he was to make
there, standing with her in the moonlit garden after years of
estrangement and adventure. At those moments the soft speeches of
Claude Melnotte rose to his lips and eased his unrest. A tender
premonition touched him of the tryst he had then looked forward to and,
in spite of the horrible reality which lay between his hope of then and
now, of the holy encounter he had then imagined at which weakness and
timidity and inexperience were to fall from him.

Such moments passed and the wasting fires of lust sprang up again. The
verses passed from his lips and the inarticulate cries and the unspoken
brutal words