“There came a night when I found myself thinking, and I knew then that a new terror was stealing into my life.  I made my way up to the roof of the house where that old man had first taken me, and I leaned once more over the palisading and looked eastwards.  I fancied that I could still hear the echoes of his frenzied words, and for the first time I heard the note of mockery ringing clearly through them.  There they stretched—­the same blackened wilderness of roofs sheltering the same horde of drinking, filthy, cursing, parasitical creatures; there flared the gin-palaces, more of them, more brilliantly lit, more gorgeously decorated.  Ten years of my life, and what had I done?  What could any one do?  The truth seemed suddenly written across the sky in letters of fire.  I, a poor human creature, had been fighting with a few other fanatics against the inviolable, the unconquerable laws of nature.  The hideous mistake of all individual effort was suddenly revealed to me.  ’We were like a handful of children striving to dam a mighty torrent with a few handfuls of clay.  Better a thousand times that these people rotted—­and died in their holes, that disease should stalk through their streets, and all the evil passions born of their misery and filth should be allowed to blaze forth that the whole world might see, so the laws of the world might intervene, the great natural laws by which alone these things could be changed.  I looked down at myself, then wasted to the bone, a stranger to the taste of wine or tobacco, to all the joys of life, a miserable heart-broken wretch, and I cursed that old man and the thought of him till my lips were dry and my throat ached.  I walked back to my miserable dwelling with a red fire before my eyes, muttering, cursing that power which stood behind the universe, and which we call God, that there should be vomited forth into the world day by day, hour by hour, this black stream of human wretchedness, an everlasting mockery to those who would seek for the joy of life.

“They took me to the hospital, and they called my illness brain-fever.  But long before they thought me convalescent I was conscious, lying awake and plotting my escape.  With cunning I managed it.  Of my wife and child I never once thought.  Every trace of human affection seemed withered up in my heart.  I took the money subscribed for me with a hypocrite’s smile, and I slunk away from England.  I went to Montreal in Canada, and I deliberately entered upon a life of low pleasures.  Pardon me!”

He bent forward and with a steady hand readjusted the shade of a lamp which was in danger of burning.  Lady Caroom leaned back in her chair with an indrawn sobbing breath.  The action at such a moment seemed grotesque.  His own coolness, whilst with steady fingers he probed away amongst the wounded places of his life, was in itself gruesome.