Twice in one week did this fever surge up in him, and it caught him in
those moments when, exhausted by the struggle of his mind to adapt itself
to the new conditions, his senses were delicately susceptible. Visions
of Jolicoeur's saloon came to his mind's eye. With a singular
separateness, a new-developed dual sense, he saw himself standing in the
summer heat, looking over to the cool dark doorway of the saloon, and he
caught again the smell of the fresh-drawn beer. He was conscious of
watching himself do this and that, of seeing himself move here and there.
He began to look upon Charley Steele as a man he had known--he, Charles
Mallard, had known--while he had to suffer for what Charley Steele had
done. Then, all at once, as he was thinking and dreaming and seeing,
there would seize upon him the old appetite, coincident with the seizure
of his brain by the old sense of cynicism at its worst--such a worst as
had made him insult Jake Hough when the rough countryman was ready to
take his part that wild night at the Cote Dorion.

At such moments life became a conflict--almost a terror--for as yet he
had not swung into line with the new order of things. In truth, there
was no order of things; for one life was behind him and the new one was
not yet decided upon, save that here he would stay--here out of the
world, out of the game, far from old associations, cut off, and to be for
ever cut off, from all that he had ever known or seen or felt or loved!
. . . Loved! When did he ever love? If love was synonymous with
unselfishness, with the desire to give greater than the desire to get,
then he had never known love. He realised now that he had given Kathleen
only what might be given across a dinner-table--the sensuous tribute of
a temperament, passionate without true passion or faith or friendship.
Kathleen had known that he gave her nothing worth the having; for in some
meagre sense she knew what love was, and had given it meagrely, after her