had set her candle on the hearth and done her work as stealthily as
possible, but he had been disturbed, though he had made a desperate
effort to struggle back into sleep. That was no use--no use. He was
awake and he was in the midst of it all again. Without the sense of
luxurious comfort he opened his eyes and turned upon his back, throwing
out his arms flatly, so that he lay as in the form of a cross, in heavy
weariness and anguish. For months he had awakened each morning after
such a night and had so lain like a crucified thing.

As he watched the painful flickering of the damp and smoking wood and
coal he remembered this and thought that there had been a lifetime of
such awakenings, not knowing that the morbidness of a fagged brain
blotted out the memory of more normal days and told him fantastic lies
which were but a hundredth part truth. He could see only the hundredth
part truth, and it assumed proportions so huge that he could see nothing
else. In such a state the human brain is an infernal machine and its
workings can only be conquered if the mortal thing which lives with it--
day and night, night and day--has learned to separate its controllable
from its seemingly uncontrollable atoms, and can silence its clamor on
its way to madness.

Antony Dart had not learned this thing and the clamor had had its
hideous way with him. Physicians would have given a name to his mental
and physical condition. He had heard these names often--applied to men
the strain of whose lives had been like the strain of his own, and had
left them as it had left him--jaded, joyless, breaking things. Some of
them had been broken and had died or were dragging out bruised and
tormented days in their own homes or in mad-houses. He always shuddered
when he heard their names, and rebelled with sick fear against the mere
mention of them. They had worked as he had worked, they had been