Yet, all the same, he passed his hand very wearily over his
forehead, and stretched himself with the air of one who had been in
a cramping position for many hours.

"You have broken your vow!" I cried. "You have been writing at
night."

"No," he said; "it was morning when I began--three o'clock. And it
pays better to get up and write than to lie awake thinking."

Judging by the speed with which the novel grew in the next few
weeks, I could tell that Derrick's nights were of the worst.

He began, too, to look very thin and haggard, and I more than once
noticed that curious 'sleep-walking' expression in his eyes; he
seemed to me just like a man who has received his death-blow, yet
still lingers--half alive, half dead. I had an odd feeling that it
was his novel which kept him going, and I began to wonder what would
happen when it was finished.

A month later, when I met him again at Bath, he had written the last
chapter of 'At Strife,' and we read it over the sitting-room fire on
Saturday evening. I was very much struck with the book; it seemed
to me a great advance on 'Lynwood's Heritage,' and the part which he
had written since that day at Ben Rhydding was full of an
indescribable power, as if the life of which he had been robbed had
flowed into his work. When he had done, he tied up the MS. in his
usual prosaic fashion, just as if it had been a bundle of clothes,
and put it on a side table.