was very still, and a mantle of
peace was spread over the tender scene. The window and the glass doors
that gave from Ingolby's room upon the veranda on the south side of the
house, were open, and the air was warm as in Midsummer. Now and then the
note of a night-bird broke the stillness, but nothing more.

It was such a night as Ingolby loved; it was such a night as often
found him out in the restful gloom of the trees, thinking and brooding,
planning, revelling in memories of books he had read, and in dreaming of
books he might write-if there were time. Such a night insulated the dark
moods which possessed him occasionally almost as effectively as fishing
did; and that was saying much.

But the darkest mood of all his days was upon him now. When Rockwell
came, soon after Jim and the nurse left him, he simulated sleep, for he
had no mind to talk; and the doctor, deceived by his even breathing, had
left, contented. At last he was wholly alone with his own thoughts, as
he desired. From the moment Jim had read him the wires, which were
the real revelation of the situation to which he had come, he had been
travelling hard on the road leading to a cul-de-sac, from which there
was no egress save by breaking through the wall. Never, it might have
seemed, had his mind been clearer, but it was a clearness belonging to
the abnormal. It was a straight line of thought which, in its intensity,
gathered all other thoughts into its wake, reduced them to the control
of an obsession. It was borne in on his mind that his day was done, that
nothing could right the disorder which had strewn his path with
broken hopes and shattered ambitions. No life-work left, no schemes to
accomplish, no construction to achieve, no wealth to gain, no public
good to be won, no home to be his, no woman, his very own, to be his
counsellor and guide in the natural way!

As myriad thoughts drove through his brain on this Indian-summer night,
they all merged into the one obsession that he could no longer stay. The
irresistible logic of the brain stretched to an abnormal tenuity, and
an intolerable brightness was with him. He was in the throes of that
intense visualization which comes with insomnia, when one is awake yet
apart from the waking world, where nothing is really real and nothing
normal. He had a call to go hence, and he must go. Minute after minute
passed, hours passed, and the fight of the soul to maintain itself
against the disordered mind went