m for a short time forget. That was incredible, yet it was the fact.

It was an antichristian book. A woman's love of God had made Dion in his
bitterness antichristian. It was an enormously vital book, and called to
the vitality which misery had not killed within him. There were passages
in it which seemed to have been written specially for him--passages that
went into him like a sword and drew blood from out of the very depths of
him.

"Better the worm of Izrail than Death that walks in form of life"--that
was for him. He had substituted for death, swift, easy, a mere nothing,
the long, slow terrific something. Death that walks in form of life.
Deliberately he had chosen that.

"On thought itself feed not thy thought; nor turn
From Sun and Light to gaze
At darkling cloisters paved with tombs where rot
The bones of bygone days----"

What else had he done since he had wandered in the wilderness?

"There is no Good, there is no Bad, these be
The whims of mortal will:
What works me weal that call I 'good,' what harms
And hurts I hold as 'ill.'"

These words drove out the pale Fantasy he had fallen down and worshiped.
It had harmed and hurt him. Haji Abdu El-Yezdi bade him henceforth hold
it as "ill." If he could only do that, would not gates open before him,
would not, perhaps, the power to live again in a new way arise within
him?

"Do what thy Manhood bids thee do, from
None but self expect applause;
He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes
And keeps his self-made laws.

All other Life is living Death, a world where
None but Phantoms dwell,
A breath, a wind, a sound, a voice, a tinkling
Of the Camel bell."

He had lived the other life, for he had lived for another; he had lived
to earn the applause of affection from Rosamund; he had striven always
to fit his life into her pattern; now he was alone with the result.

"Pluck the old woman from thy breast: be
Stout in woe, be stark in weal-- . . . . . . . spurn
Bribe of Heav'n and threat of Hell."

He had chosen the death that walks in the form of life; now something
powerful, stirred from sleep by the influence of one not dead, rose up
in him to reject that death. And it was the same thing that long ago
had enabled him to be pure before his marriage, the same thing which had
enabled him to put England before even Ro