stay the
distance. I can't stay the distance."

His knees gave way beneath him and he fell to the floor beating the
boards and blubbering like a school-boy.

But there came no answer from the hollow empty house and presently the
paroxysm passed and he looked up slowly seeing, as it were, a vision of
himself false to every tradition of manhood he had held most dear.

"Coward!" he said. "Rotten blasted coward! Three weeks and this is
the last day." He looked at his watch. "Only another hour and then
I'm free to speak. Stick it for another hour. Stick it for another
hour."

And the very saying of the words seemed to increase his stature, swell
his chest, revitalise his manhood.

When a moment later the door opened and Van Diest chanting his
perpetual hymn came quietly into the room he found Richard rocking on
his heels beside a chair beating time to the music with a shaking
forefinger while from his parched lips he emitted a pathetic pretence
at whistling the same tune.

"S'bad," muttered Hugo Van Diest. "S'bad business. Must tink all the
time and be worried by dese things. For God's sake you don't fidget.
You tink all the suffering was wit you, but it was inside of me where
the pain live."

"Ha ha!" said Richard.

"Discomfort is nutting. I haf before me the prospec' to be beat. It
wass the torture to be beat. You know that."

"Not yet."

"Mus' be taught."

"Ha ha!" said Richard again and banged the dish cover against the table
implements of a foodless tray that had marked the hour of a meal time.

"Don't fidget!" roared Van Diest, emitting a cloud of tobacco smoke.

"Don't smoke!" Richard countered in the same tone.

"I shmoke on purpose."

"And I fidget on purpose."

With a sweep of the hand he sent the tray with a crashing to the floor.

"Ach! Ach! Ach!" cried Van Diest, and was almost choked with a
violent attack of coughing.

"I make you to speak! I make you to speak! What if I burn you with my
cigar--what if I----" he stopped abruptly and dropped his voice almost
to a whine. "You don't know how goot I make myself to you. I wass a
very kind man. At my home I keep the birds."

"Poor darlings," said Richard.

"The canaries; and you look what I haf here. A portrait of my little
granddaughter Sibelle. She sit on my knee the Sunday afternoon and
listen to the tale of Hansell and Grethel. She call me Grandparkins."

Richard swept the photograph aside with the back of his h