which knows no tears.

"Father!" he breathed. "Father! Father!"

Upstairs, Anthony Dexter walked through the hall, followed, or
occasionally preceded, by the ghostly figure of Evelina. Her veil
was thrown back now, and seemed a part of the mist which surrounded
her. Sometimes he had told a patient that there was never a point
beyond which human endurance could not be made to go. He knew now
that he had lied.

Ralph's unspoken condemnation had hurt him cruelly. He could have
borne words, he thought, better than that look on his son's face.
For the first time, he realised how much he had cared for Ralph; how
much--God help him!--he cared for him still.

Yet above it all, dominant, compelling, was man's supreme
passion--that for his mate. As Evelina moved before him in her
unveiled beauty, his hungry soul leaped to meet hers. Now,
strangely, he loved her as he had loved her in the long ago, yet with
an added grace. There was an element in his love that had never been
there before--the mysterious bond which welds more firmly into one,
two who have suffered together.

He hungered for Ralph--for the strong young arm thrown about his
shoulders in friendly fashion, for the eager, boyish laugh, the
hearty word. He hungered for Evelina, radiant with a beauty no woman
had ever worn before. Far past the promise of her girlhood, the
noble, transfigured face, with its glory of lustreless white hair,
set his pulses to throbbing wildly. And subtly, unconsciously, but
not the less surely, he hungered for death.

Anthony Dexter had cherished no sentiment about the end of life; to
him it had seemed much the same as the stopping of a clock, and of as
little moment. He had failed to see why such a fuss was made about
the inevitable, though he had at times been scientifically interested
in the hysterical effect he had produced in a household by announcing
that within an hour or so a particular human clock might be expected
to stop. It had never occurred to him, either, that a man had not a
well-defined right to stop the clock of his own being whenever it
seemed desirable or expedient.

Now he thought of death as the final, beautiful solution of all
mundane problems. If he were dead, Ralph could not look at him with
contempt; the veiled--or unveiled--Evelina could not haunt him as she
had, remorselessly, for months. Yes, death was beautiful, and he
well knew how to make it sure.

By an incredibly swift transition,