He
spoke so seldom that the sound of his own voice was strange to him.

'Thinking over it, I suppose, in your usual solid way. Don't be hurried.
But I must tell you of this affair of mine. You know Dora Milvain? I
have asked her to marry me, and, by the Powers! she has given me an
encouraging answer. Not an actual yes, but encouraging! She's away in
the Channel Islands, and I wrote--'

He talked on for a quarter of an hour. Then, with a sudden movement, the
listener freed himself.

'I can't go any farther,' he said hoarsely. 'Good-bye!'

Whelpdale was disconcerted.

'I have been boring you. That's a confounded fault of mine; I know it.'

Biffen had waved his hand, and was gone.

A week or two more would see him at the end of his money. He had no
lessons now, and could not write; from his novel nothing was to be
expected. He might apply again to his brother, but such dependence was
unjust and unworthy. And why should he struggle to preserve a life which
had no prospect but of misery?

It was in the hours following his encounter with Whelpdale that he first
knew the actual desire of death, the simple longing for extinction. One
must go far in suffering before the innate will-to-live is thus truly
overcome; weariness of bodily anguish may induce this perversion of
the instincts; less often, that despair of suppressed emotion which
had fallen upon Harold. Through the night he kept his thoughts fixed on
death in its aspect of repose, of eternal oblivion. And herein he had
found solace.

The next night it was the same. Moving about among common needs and
occupations, he knew not a moment's cessation of heart-ache, but when
he lay down in the darkness a hopeful summons whispered to him. Night,
which had been the worst season of his pain, had now grown friendly; it
came as an anticipation of the sleep that is everlasting.

A few more days, and he was possessed by a calm of spirit such as he had
never known. His resolve was taken, not in a moment of supreme conflict,
but as the result of a subtle process by which his imagination had
become in love with death. Turning from contemplation of life's one
rapture, he looked with the same intensity of desire to a state that had
neither fear nor hope.

One afternoon he went to the Museum Reading-room, and was busy for a few
minutes in consultation of a volume which he took from the shelves
of medical literature. On his way homeward he entered two or three
chemists' shops.