hsemane; there to take up his cross and to bear it until the time
came to lay it down by the side of the grave.

He had thought it all out long and earnestly in solitary communion with
his own soul, and during many long and closely-reasoned conversations
with Ernshaw, and the one of the night before had decided him--or it
might be more correct to say that it had completed the sum of the
convictions which had been accumulating in his soul for the last two
years.

The path of duty--duty to her, to himself and to Humanity--lay straight
and plain before him. He had nothing to do with the world now. He had
come to look upon that taint in his blood as a taint akin to that of
leprosy; an inherited curse which forbade him to mix with his kind as
other men did. He must stand aloof, crying "unclean" in his soul if not
with his voice. Henceforth he must be in the world and not of it--and
this, as he thought, he had already proved by his resolve to renounce
definitely and for ever the greatest treasure which the world could give
him, a treasure which had been his so long, that giving it up was like
tearing a part of his own being away with his own hands.

Still, it was all very hard and very bitter. Despite his two years'
preparation, the stress of that last struggle all through the long hours
of the night which should have been filled with brightest dreams of the
morrow, had left him, not only mentally worn out, but even physically
sick. He felt as though the scene which would mark the culminating
triumph of his academic career, the end of his youth and the beginning
of his manhood, was really an ordeal too great, too agonising, to be
faced.

His scout had brought up an ample breakfast, with, of course, many
congratulations on the coming honours of the day; but he had only drunk
some of the coffee and left the food untouched. As he stood in front of
the glass, putting on his collar, his face looked to him more like that
of a man going to execution, than to take the public reward of many a
silent hour of hard study. His hands trembled so that he could hardly
get his necktie into decent shape.

His coffee on the dressing-table. Would a teaspoonful of brandy in it do
him any harm? For two years he had not tasted alcohol in any shape,
though he had kept it in his rooms for his friends. He and Ernshaw, who
was also a rigid teetotaler, had sat with them and seen them drink. He
had smelt the fumes of it in the atmosphere of the room