the glass
revulsion took hold of him; and on the heels of revulsion came
self-scorn. This last roused him like the prick of a spur: for to men
of Eldred Lenox's calibre, self-respect is the oxygen of the soul. The
spirit of his grandfather had "scored a point" to-night. But such an
achievement must not be risked again.

With the same deliberation that had marked all his former movements,
Lenox picked up the bottle, emptied its sluggish contents down one of
those primitive sluices that are to be found in every Indian bungalow,
and returned, still absently holding it between his finger and thumb.
A confession of weakness: there is no denying it. But let him who has
not yet found the devil's chink in his own defences cast the stone.
Head, heart, or heel--there is a weak spot in the strongest. Not even
Achilles' self was plunged wholesale into the waters of immunity.

Quite suddenly Lenox realised that he was still holding the bottle: and
for some unfathomable reason the trivial detail acted as a fuse that
fires the magazine. For the first time that night, unreasoning anger
mastered him: anger against himself; against the whole tragi-comical
scheme of things: against the man whose dead sins he was called upon to
expiate in his own living flesh.

A curse forced its way between his teeth; and he flung the unoffending
scrap of glass into the open hearth, where it clinked and shivered into
a hundred splinters, filling the room with the strong sickly odour of
the drug.

Then he went back again to the long chair; limbs and brain weighted
with a luxury of weariness. Shattered hope; a life-and-death struggle
ahead:--the words held no meaning for him now. His lids fell. The
balm of Nirvana shrouded his senses, blotting out thought, as sea
mists, rolling landward, obliterate all things.

The June morning broke in one sheet of gold. Creeping in through the
interstices of lowered "chicks," it emphasised the untidy, up-all-night
aspect of the room; the sharp lines, pencilled by pain and struggle, on
the sleeper's face, where he lay full length, in shirt-sleeves and
scarlet waistcoat, unhooked and flung open before weariness overpowered
him.

A deep sound, persistently repeated, at last invaded and dispelled the
drugged torpor of his brain: the voice of Zyarulla murmuring:
"Sahib--Sahib," with the regularity of a minute-gun.

Lenox stirred, yawned, and looked blankly about him, as though he had
waked in another world.