were to go aboard her the third day following. In the meantime,
Whitaker would have little leisure in which to brood, the winding up of
his affairs being counted upon to occupy him. Peter had his own affairs
to look to, for that matter, but he was prepared to slight them if
necessary, in order that Whitaker might not be left too much to
himself....

Whitaker shut the hall door, when the elevator had taken Peter away, and
turned back wearily into his living-room. It was three in the morning;
his body ached with fatigue, his eyes were hot and aching in their
sockets, and his mouth hot and parched with excess of smoking; yet he
made no move toward his bedchamber. Insomnia was a diagnostic of his
malady: a fact he hadn't mentioned to his friend. He had little wish to
surrender his mind to the devils that haunt a wakeful pillow, especially
now when he could feel the reaction setting in from the anodynous
excitement of the last few hours. Peter Stark's whirlwind enthusiasm had
temporarily swept him off his feet, and he had yielded to it,
unresisting, selfish enough to want to be carried away against the wiser
counsels of his intuition.

But now, alone, doubts beset him.

Picking his way across a floor littered with atlases, charts, maps and
guide-books, he resumed his chair and pipe and with the aid of a copy of
"The Wrecker" and a nightcap, strove to drug himself again with the
fascination of the projected voyage. But the savour had gone out of it
all. An hour before he had been able to distil a potent magic, thought
obliterating, by sheer force of repetition of the names, Apia, Hawaii,
Tahiti, Samoa.... Now all their promise was an emptiness and a mockery.
The book slipped unheeded from his grasp; his pipe grew cold between his
teeth; his eyes burned like lamps in their deep hollows, with their
steady and undeviating glare....

Dawn-dusk filled the high windows with violet light before he moved.

He rose, went to the bath-room and took a bottle of chloral from the
medicine-closet. He wondered at the steadiness of the hand that measured
out the prescribed dose--no more, no less. He wondered at the strength
of will which enabled him to take no more. There was enough in the
bottle to purchase him eternity.

What he took bought him three hours of oblivion. He rose at eight,
ordered his breakfast up by telephone, bathed and dressed. When the tray
came up, his mail came with it. Among others there was one letter in a
woman