fundamental, had thrust its face through all his explanations and
glosses and consolations and grinned enigmatically. Though he was
hungry and tired, he did not go on directly to the Labour Hotel, where
he would meet Elizabeth. He found he was beginning to think, he wanted
very greatly to think; and so, wrapped in a monstrous cloud of
meditation, he went the circuit of the city on his moving platform
twice. You figure him, tearing through the glaring, thunder-voiced city
at a pace of fifty miles an hour, the city upon the planet that spins
along its chartless path through space many thousands of miles an hour,
funking most terribly, and trying to understand why the heart and will
in him should suffer and keep alive.

When at last he came to Elizabeth, she was white and anxious. He might
have noted she was in trouble, had it not been for his own
preoccupation. He feared most that she would desire to know every detail
of his indignities, that she would be sympathetic or indignant. He saw
her eyebrows rise at the sight of him.

"I've had rough handling," he said, and gasped. "It's too fresh--too
hot. I don't want to talk about it." He sat down with an unavoidable air
of sullenness.

She stared at him in astonishment, and as she read something of the
significant hieroglyphic of his battered face, her lips whitened. Her
hand--it was thinner now than in the days of their prosperity, and her
first finger was a little altered by the metal punching she
did--clenched convulsively. "This horrible world!" she said, and said no
more.

In these latter days they had become a very silent couple; they said
scarcely a word to each other that night, but each followed a private
train of thought. In the small hours, as Elizabeth lay awake, Denton
started up beside her suddenly--he had been lying as still as a dead
man.

"I cannot stand it!" cried Denton. "I _will_ not stand it!"

She saw him dimly, sitting up; saw his arm lunge as if in a furious blow
at the enshrouding night. Then for a space he was still.

"It is too much--it is more than one can bear!"

She could say nothing. To her, also, it seemed that this was as far as
one could go. She waited through a long stillness. She could see that
Denton sat with his arms about his knees, his chin almost touching them.

Then he laughed.

"No," he said at last, "I'm going to stand it. That's the peculiar
thing. There isn't a grain of suicide in us--not a grain. I suppose all
the pe