ned at the window, and at last a narrow ray of sunlight stole
trembling up into the dusky bowl of the sky.

At any rate Quain was found, with all the ills of life, from A to I; and
Lawford turned back to his bondage with the book under his arm.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Sabbath, pale with September sunshine, and monotonous with chiming
bells, had passed languidly away. Dr Simon had come and gone, optimistic
and urbane, yet with a faint inward dissatisfaction over a patient
behind whose taciturnity a hint of mockery and subterfuge seemed to
lurk. Even Mrs Lawford had appeared to share her husband's reticence.
But Dr Simon had happened on other cases in his experience where tact
was required rather than skill, and time than medicine.

The voices and footsteps, even the frou-frou of worshippers going to
church, the voices and footsteps of worshippers returning from church,
had floated up to the patient's open window. Sunlight had drawn across
his room in one pale beam, and vanished. A few callers had called.
Hothouse flowers, waxen and pale, had been left with messages of
sympathy. Even Dr Critchett had respectfully and discreetly made
inquiries on his way home from chapel.

Lawford had spent most of his time in pacing to and fro in his soft
slippers. The very monotony had eased his mind. Now and again he had
lain motionless, with his face to the ceiling. He had dozed and had
awakened, cold and torpid with dream. He had hardly been aware of
the process, but every hour had done something, it seemed, towards
clarifying his point of view. A consciousness had begun to stir in him
that was neither that of the old, easy Lawford, whom he had never been
fully aware of before, nor of this strange ghostly intelligence that
haunted the hawklike, restless face, and plucked so insistently at his
distracted nerves. He had begun in a vague fashion to be aware of them
both, could in a fashion discriminate between them, almost as if there
really were two spirits in stubborn conflict within him. It would, of
course, wear him down in time. There could be only one end to such a
struggle--THE end.

All day he had longed for freedom, on and on, with craving for the open
sky, for solitude, for green silence, beyond these maddening walls. This
heedful silken coming and going, these Sunday voices, this reiterant
yelp of a single peevish bell--would they never cease? And above all,
betwixt dread and an almost physical greed, he hungered for nig