muffling his head in its
terrible black folds, stopping his nostrils with its black fingers,
gripping his windpipe with black cords, so that his breathing stopped.

That blackness for which he had craved with an unappeasable hopeless
craving through thirty years and more was become a horror and a devil.
He had driven it from him. When he bade it return it returned not as a
friend and a comforter but as a mocking fiend.

For months and years past he had realized that his optic nerves,
punished and preyed upon by constant and unwholesome brilliancy, were
nearing the point of collapse, and that all the other nerves in his
body, frayed and fretted, too, were all askew and jangled. Cognizant of
this he still could see no hope of relief, since his fears were greater
than his reasoning powers or his strength of will. With the fear lifted
and eternally dissipated in a breath, he had thought to find solace and
soothing and restoration in the darkness. But now the darkness, for
which his soul in its longing and his body in its stress had cried out
unceasingly and vainly, was denied him too. He could face neither the
one thing nor the other.

Squatted there in the huddle of the bed coverings, he reasoned it all
out, and presently he found the answer. And the answer was this: Nature
for a while forgets and forgives offenses against her, but there comes a
time when Nature ceases to forgive the mistreatment of the body and the
mind, and sends then her law of atonement, to be visited upon the
transgressor with interest compounded a hundredfold. The user of
narcotics knows it; the drunkard knows it; and this poor self-crucified
victim of his own imagination--he knew it too. The hint of it had that
day been reflected in the attitude of his neighbors, for they merely had
obeyed, without conscious realization or analysis on their part, a law
of the natural scheme of things. The direct proof of it was, by this
nighttime thing, revealed and made yet plainer. He stood convicted, a
chronic violator of the immutable rule. And he knew, likewise, there was
but one way out of the coil--and took it, there in his bedroom, vividly
ringed about by the obscene and indecent circlet of his lights which
kept away the blessed, cursed darkness while the suicide's soul was
passing.

CHAPTER II

THE CATER-CORNERED SEX

They had a saying down our way in the old days that Judge Priest
administered law inside his courthouse and justice outside o