sat down, the devil's own clutch on
his shrinking nerves, a deathly desire tearing at his very vitals, and
every vein a tiny trail of fire run riot. He had been too long without
it, too long to endure the craving aroused by that gay draught from
Quarrier's loving-cup.

The awakened fury of his desire appalled him, and for a while that
occupied him, enabling him to endure. But fear and dismay soon passed
in the purely physical distress; he walked the floor, haggard, the sweat
starting on his face; he lay with clenched hands, stiffened out across
the bed, deafened by the riotous clamour of his pulses, conscious that
he was holding out, unconscious how long he could hold out.

Crisis after crisis swept him; sometimes he found his feet and moved
blindly about the room.

Strange periods of calm intervened; sensation seemed deadened; and he
stood as a man who listens, scarcely daring to breathe lest the enemy
awake and seize him.

He turned on the light, later, to look for his pipe, and he caught a
glimpse of himself in the mirror. It was a sick man who stared back
at him out of hollow eyes, and the physical revulsion shocked him into
something resembling self-command.

"Damn you!" he said fiercely, setting his teeth and staring back at his
reflected face, "I'll kill you yet before I've finished with you!"

Then he filled his pipe, and opening his bedroom window, sat down,
resting his arm on the sill. A splendid moon silvered the sea; through
the intense stillness he heard the surf, magnificently dissonant among
the reefs, and he listened, fascinated, loathing the tides as he feared
and loathed the inexorable tides that surged and ebbed with his accursed
desire.

Once he said to himself, weakly--for he was deadly tired--"What am I
making the fight for, anyway?" And "Who are you making the fight for?"
echoed his heavy pulses.

He had asked that question and received that answer before. After all,
it had been for his mother's sake alone. And now--and now?--his heart
beat out another answer; and before his eyes two other eyes seemed to
open, fearlessly, sweetly, divinely tender. But they were no longer his
mother's grave, gray eyes.

After the second pipe he remembered his letter. It gave him something to
do, so he opened it and tried to read it, but for a long while, in his
confused physical and mental condition, he could make no sense of it.

Little by little he began to comprehend its purport that his resignation