which a few minutes ago he had listened
greedily were specious, futile, utterly false. That sort of argument
might do for other men--might do for every other man in the wide
world--but it would not do for _him_, William Dale. Its acceptance
would knock the very ground from under his feet.

For, if there could be any excuse, why had he killed Everard
Barradine?

XXX

Then Dale lived again for the hundred thousandth time in the thoughts
and passions of that distant period.

The forest glade grew dim, vanished. He was lying on the grass in a
London park, and Mavis' confession rang through the buzzing of his
ears, through the chaos of his mind. It seemed that the whole of his
small imagined world had gone to pieces, and the immensity of the real
world had been left to him in exchange--crushing him with an idea of
its unexplored vastness, of its many countries, its myriad races. And
yet, big as it all was, it could not provide breathing space for that
man and himself.

Soon this became an oppressive certainty. Life under the new
conditions had been rendered unendurable. And then there grew up the
one solid determination, that he must stand face to face with his
enemy and call him to account. It must _at last_ be man to man. He
must tell the man what he thought of him, call him filthy names, strip
him of every shred of dignity--and strike him. A few blows of scorn
might suffice--a backhander across the snout, a few swishes with a
stick, a kick behind when he turned. He was too rottenly weak a thing
to fight with.

His mind refused to go further than this. However deeply and darkly it
was working below the surface of consciousness, it gave him no
further directions than this.

He got rid of his wife. That was the first move in the game--anyhow.
He did not want to think about her now; she would be dealt with again
later on. At present he wished to concentrate all his attention on the
other one.

He took a bed for himself in a humbler and cheaper house farther west,
a little nearer to the house of his enemy; and almost all that day he
spent in thinking how and where he should obtain the meeting he longed
for. He understood at once that it would be hopeless to attempt such
an interview at Grosvenor Place. In imagination he saw himself
escorted by servants to that tank-like room at the back of the
mansion--the room where the man had treated him as dirt, where his
first instinct of distrust had been aroused, wh