servant went stiff. 

 “Some poetry, sir,” came the crackling, unrecognizable sound of his voice. 

 “Poetry, what poetry?” asked the Captain, with a sickly smile. 

 Again there was the working in the throat. The Captain’s heart had suddenly gone down heavily, and he stood sick and tired. 

 “For my girl, sir,” he heard the dry, inhuman sound. 

 “Oh!” he said, turning away. “Clear the table.” 

 “Click!” went the soldier’s throat; then again, “click!” and then the half-articulate: 

 “Yes, sir.” 

 The young soldier was gone, looking old, and walking heavily. 

 The officer, left alone, held himself rigid, to prevent himself from thinking. His instinct warned him that he must not think. Deep inside him was the intense gratification of his passion, still working powerfully. Then there was a counter-action, a horrible breaking down of something inside him, a whole agony of reaction. He stood there for an hour motionless, a chaos of sensations, but rigid with a will to keep blank his consciousness, to prevent his mind grasping. And he held himself so until the worst of the stress had passed, when he began to drink, drank himself to an intoxication, till he slept obliterated. When he woke in the morning he was shaken to the base of his nature. But he had fought off the realization of what he had done. He had prevented his mind from taking it in, had suppressed it along with his instincts, and the conscious man had nothing to do with it. He felt only as after a bout of intoxication, weak, but the affair itself all dim and not to be recovered. Of the drunkenness of his passion he successfully refused remembrance. And when his orderly appeared with coffee, the officer assumed the same self he had had the morning before. He refused the event of the past night—denied it had ever been—and was successful in his denial. He had not done any such thing—not he himself. Whatever there might be lay at the door of a stupid, insubordinate servant. 

 The orderly had gone about in a stupor all the evening. He drank some beer because he was parched, but not much, the alcohol made his feeling come back, and he could not bear it. He was dulled, as if nine-tenths of the ordinary man in him 

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