to the stairs, down, stood above them with brandished fists. And when they had gone he still stood there for a space, trembling and alone.

Then he turned and went haltingly back into the room. He was no longer drunk. He was as sober as hell. He went into the room, stood at the door, frozen, ghastly white. The lamp still stood on the mantel, and he crossed to it without knowing what he did. He stood before it.

There was a cracked mirror behind the lamp, above the mantel. Wint saw himself in it. He looked into his own eyes for a long instant; and then his face twitched into a terrible, shamed, disgusted grimace. He lifted the lamp in both hands and sent it crashing into the grate in the fireplace. It splintered and shivered into fragments. The flame of the wick still burned, however, and the oil that had spilled caught fire, so that for a time the hearth and the grate were wreathed in blue flame.

Then the oil burned itself out. The room was left in darkness. Wint went slowly across to the miserable bed and sat down on it. He gripped his head in his hands. After a little he lay down on his back on the bed. Presently his misery and shame became so poignant that tears filled his eyes and welled over and flowed down his cheeks to the pillow. He ignored them. 

Eventually, the silence in the room was torn by a single, racking sob.

**END OF BOOK ONE**

**BOOK II**

**CHAPTER I - MULDOON**

The sun woke Wint in the morning; and the awakening was cruel. Level, white-hot rays burned through his eyelids as though they would char to cinders his aching eyes. He threw his arm fretfully across his face to keep off the glare and lay quietly on the shabby bed, groping back into the night and into the hours of the preceding day in a terrible effort to remember. 

There was no more drunkenness in him. The shock of what they had told him had banished that. He was sober. Too sober, in all conscience, for any peace of mind. It was his loneliness that was most torturing. If there had been someone near, some other person in the room, for whose 

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