mong other things, he strove to
exhaust himself during the day, so that sleep would render him deaf to
the call of the night. He took a vacation from the office and went on
long hunting trips, following the deer through the most inaccessible and
rugged country he could find--and always in the daytime. Night found him
indoors and tired. At home he installed a score of exercise machines,
and where other men might go through a particular movement ten times, he
went hundreds. Also, as a compromise, he built a sleeping porch on the
second story. Here he at least breathed the blessed night air. Double
screens prevented him from escaping into the woods, and each night Lee
Sing locked him in and each morning let him out.

The time came, in the month of August, when he engaged additional
servants to assist Lee Sing and dared a house party in his Mill Valley
bungalow. Lilian, her mother and brother, and half a dozen mutual
friends, were the guests. For two days and nights all went well. And on
the third night, playing bridge till eleven o'clock, he had reason to be
proud of himself. His restlessness fully hid, but as luck would have it,
Lilian Gersdale was his opponent on his right. She was a frail delicate
flower of a woman, and in his night-mood her very frailty incensed
him. Not that he loved her less, but that he felt almost irresistibly
impelled to reach out and paw and maul her. Especially was this true
when she was engaged in playing a winning hand against him.

He had one of the deer-hounds brought in and, when it seemed he must fly
to pieces with the tension, a caressing hand laid on the animal brought
him relief. These contacts with the hairy coat gave him instant easement
and enabled him to play out the evening. Nor did anyone guess the
while terrible struggle their host was making, the while he laughed so
carelessly and played so keenly and deliberately.

When they separated for the night, he saw to it that he parted from
Lilian in the presence or the others. Once on his sleeping porch
and safely locked in, he doubled and tripled and even quadrupled his
exercises until, exhausted, he lay down on the couch to woo sleep and to
ponder two problems that especially troubled him. One was this matter
of exercise. It was a paradox. The more he exercised in this excessive
fashion, the stronger he became. While it was true that he thus quite
tired out his night-running Teutonic self, it seemed that he was merely
setting back