and the night between us."

He rose and began pacing the piazza as he continued speaking. "It's
always been so with me--as early as my boyhood it was so. I often wake
in the lonely nights and think of them all over again--the days and
nights, the girls and women who have flashed bright and radiant into my
life. Over and over again, I repeat to my soul their names, over and
over I live the hours we have spent together, the dangers, the delights,
the cruel misery of it all and then at the turn of the street, at the
corner of a room, in the winking of an eye I see another face, it looks
a challenge at me and I am out on the high road of another romance. I've
got to go! It's part of my life; it's the pulse of my blood."

He stood excited with his deep, beady, black eyes burning and his proud,
vain face flushed and his hands a-tremble. The Doctor saw that he was in
the midst of a physical and mental turmoil that could not be checked.

Van Dorn went on: "And then you and my friends ask me to quit. Laura,
God help her--she naturally--" he exclaimed. "But is the moon to be
blotted out for me? Are the night winds to be muffled and mean no more
than the scraping of a dead twig against a rusty wire? Are flowers to
lose their scent, and grass and trees and birds to be blurred and turned
drab in my eyes? How do you think I live, man? How do you think I can go
before juries and audiences and make them thrill and clench their fists
and cry like children and breathe with my emotions, if I am to be stone
dead? Do you think a wooden man can do that? Try Joe Calvin with a
jury--what does he accomplish with all his virtue? He hasn't had an
emotion in twenty years. A pretty woman looking at Joe in a crowd
wouldn't say anything to him with her eyes and dilating nostrils and the
swish of her body. And when he gets before a jury he talks the law to
them, and the facts to them, and the justice of the case to them. But
when I used to stand up before them, they knew I was weak, human mud.
They had heard all the stories on me. They knew me, and some of them
despised me, and all of them were watching out for me, but when I
reached down in my heart and brought up the common clay of which we all
are made and molded it into a man or an event before their eyes,
then--by God they came to me. And yet you've been sitting there for
years, Doctor Jim Nesbit and saying 'Tom--Tom, why don't you quit?'"

He was seated now, talking in a low, tense voice, lo