A sudden pity for the living began to well up within him ... for Hilmer in the relentless grip of the harpy who would tear at his content with her scrawny fingers ... for Mrs. Hilmer, condemned to feed to the end upon the bitter fruits of hatred ... for his wife, drifting to a pallid fate made up of petty adjustments and compromises.  Yes ... he found himself pitying Helen Starratt most of all.  Because he had a feeling that she would go on to the end cloaking her primitive impulses in a curious covering of self-deception.  She would never understand ... never!  She would always be restless, straining at the conventions, but unable or unwilling to pay the price of full freedom.  And her remaining days would be spent in a futile pulling at the chains which her own cowardice had forged.  She would not even have the memory of bitter-sweet delights.

He came from these musings to discover that his feet had strayed instinctively to the old garden which provoked the memory of his father and mother.  But he found it destroyed utterly ... its prim beds swept aside to make way for a huge apartment house.  The last intangible link which had bound him to his old life had been destroyed.

He turned away, almost with a feeling of relief—­the past was forever dead, burying itself in its own tragic oblivion.  He climbed higher, to the topmost point of the Hyde Street Hill, up the steps leading to the reservoir.  It was another night of provocative perfumes and promissory warmths.  He skirted the sun-baked slopes, sown with blossoming alfalfa, and came upon a clump of wind-tortured acacia bushes facing the west.  He threw himself down and lay in a sweet physical truce, gazing up at the twinkling sky.  He was alone with the night, he had not even a disciple to betray him.

He knew that if he willed it so he could be up and off, forever eluding, forever flaunting the law’s ubiquitous presence.  The sharp urge for subtle revenge which had come with realization of his power had passed, but he was done with any and all compromises, he had no heart for the decaying fruits of deception.

Would they find him here wrapped in the cool fragrance of the night, or must he go down to them, yielding himself up silently and without bitterness?  He had touched life at every point.  He could say, now, with Hilmer: 

“I know all the dirty, rotten things of life by direct contact!”

Yes, even to murder.

And with Storch he could repeat: 

“A man who’s been through hell is like a field broken to the plow.  He’s ready for seed.”

He was ready for seed, so freshly and deeply broken that he had a passion to lie fallow against a worthy sowing.

Presently, enveloped in the perfect and childlike faith which follows revelation, he slept, with his face turned toward the stars.  And as he stirred ever so slightly he felt the nearness of two souls.  Clearly and more clearly they defined themselves until he knew them for those two erring companions of his misery who had been made suddenly perfect in the crucible of sorrow and sacrifice.  They came toward him in a white, silent beauty, until on one side stood Felix Monet and on the other Sylvia Molineaux.