to keep his son's regard--he prayed for it, with tears in his eyes
and anguish in his voice. And so the boy had to stand by. And that
meant that he grew up in a torture-house, he drank a cup of poison
to its bitter dregs. To others his father was merely a gross little
man, with sordid ideas and low tastes; but to Thyrsis he was a man
with the terror of the hunted creatures in his soul, and the furies
of madness cracking their whips about his ears.

There was only one ending possible--it worked itself out with the
remorseless precision of a machine. The soul that fought was
smothered and stifled, its voice grew fainter and feebler; the agony
and the shame grew hotter, the suffering more cruel, the despair
more black. Until at last they found him in a delirium, and took him
to a private hospital; and thither went Thyrsis, now grown to be a
man, and sat in a dingy reception-room, and a dingy doctor came to
him and said, "Do you wish to see the body?" And Thyrsis answered,
in a low voice, "No."

Section 3. So it was that the soul of this lad had grown sombre, and
taken to brooding upon the mysteries of fate. Life was no jest and
no holiday, it was no place for shams and self-deceptions. It was a
place where cruel enemies set traps for the unwary; a field where
blind and merciless forces ranged, unhindered by man or God.

Thyrsis could not have told how soon in life this sense had come to
him. In his earliest childhood he had known that his father was
preyed upon, just as certainly as any wild thing in the forest. At
first the enemies had been saloon-keepers, and wicked men who
tempted him to drink with them. The names of these men were
household words to him, portents of terror; they peopled his