derers when, it was given
the simple task of losing a single individual among the millions of
unrelated human atoms.

Thus the threat of the peril which might be called the physical. But
beyond this there was another, and, for a man of temperament, a still
more ominous foreshadowing of evil to come. Of some subtle, deep-seated
change in himself he had long been conscious. Again and again it had
manifested itself in those moments of craven fear and ruthless,
murderous promptings, when kindliness, gratitude, love, all the
humanizing motives, had turned suddenly to frenzied hatred, and the
primitive savage had leaped up, fiercely raging with the blood-lust.

Here, again, he suffered loss, and was conscious of it. The point of
view was changed, and still changing. Something, a thing indefinable,
but none the less real, had gone out of him. Once, in the heart of a
thick darkness of squalor and misery, he had seen a great light and the
name of it was love for his kind. But now the light was waning, and in
its room a bale-fire was beckoning. There be those, fat, well-nurtured,
and complacent souls faring ever along the main-travelled roads of life,
who need no guiding lamp and will never see the glimmer of the
bale-fires. But the breaker of traditions was of those who, having once
seen the light, must follow where it leads or violate a primal law of
being. Some vague sense of this was stirring the dying embers for the
proletary as he was climbing the hill to the street of quiet entrances;
but he pushed the saving thought aside and chose to call it fanaticism.
He had drawn the line and he would hew to it.

For a long time after he had reached his room, and had had his bath and
change, Griswold sat at his writing-table with his head in his hands,
thinking in monotonous circles. As in those other stressful moments, the
importunate devil was at his ear; now mocking him for not having left
the drowned enemy as he was; now whispering the dreadful hope that age
and the shock and the drowning might still re-erect the barrier of
safety. The eyes of the recusant grew hot and a loathsome fever ran
sluggishly through his veins when he realized the depths to which he had
descended; that he, once the brother-loving, could coldly weigh the
chance of life and death for another and be unable to find in any corner
of his heart the hope that life might prevail.

He was still sitting, miserably reflective, in the dark, when Mrs.
Holcomb came