r each of them
called him with irresistible voice back to the past from which he had
sworn he would turn his eyes. It was always there with its whispering,
mocking echo, but like a good fighter he had learnt to withstand its
insidious temptations, and hold fast to the quiet, secure present
where all he could know of joy or fulfilment was centred.

But there it was, the great gulf that lay between him and the past, in
which were swallowed up the hopes, ambitions, expectations of his
vigorous youth, and all the possibilities of a man's life. He had
fathomed it to its blackest depth, and seen no hope of escape or
rescue. And yet he had escaped, through the devotion and courage of
his father. And it was the ever-living recollection of that devotion
that helped him to keep his face turned from the other side of the
gulf. Only on rare occasions did his strength of purpose fail him, and
by some momentary carelessness he found himself caught back into a
black hour of bitterness and helpless anger.

There was no one to blame but himself, no power to accuse but his own
headlong passion, and the imperious impatience that would take no gift
from life but that of his own choosing. There had been a woman and a
tangle of events, and his passion-blinded eyes could see no way of
disentangling it, and yet how trivial and easy the unravelling
appeared now. The quick--not resolve--but impulse that caught him on
the crest of his uncontrolled, wild temper, and prompted the shot that
missed its intention by a hairs-breadth: the whole so instantaneous,
so brief a hurricane of madness, succeeded by the long pulseless
stillness of this life of his now.

To do, and not to be able to undo, to hunger and thirst and ache to
take back only a short minute of life, to feel sick and blind before
the irretrievableness of his own deed, that was still his punishment
in these rare hours of darkness.

He had fought for life at first with all that virile strength of his
and won this limited existence which, when he first understood its
cruelly narrow horizon, he had as ardently longed and sought to lose
again, but the life principle that had been so roughly handled was
marvellously tenacious, and refused to be ousted from its tenement.
Slowly and painfully Aymer had groped his way from desolate despair to
something higher than mere placid resignation, to a brave tolerance of
himself and an open heart to what life might still offer him.

There was, howev