asleep? Is it
all a nightmare?"

He looked around the room, and saw the sun's rays streaming through the
windows. No, he was not asleep, he was in the bedroom of his hotel. But
why was he there? Why was his heart so heavy? Why did his head throb so
terribly?

Slowly memory began to work: he remembered dimly the swaying crowds, the
shouts of enthusiastic supporters. But it was all very vague, and it
seemed a long way off. His tongue was dry and parched, it would hardly
move in his mouth. He felt an all-devouring thirst.

"Whisky," he said, "I must have whisky!"

He moved to get out of bed; but as he did so, all the events of the past
three days came to him as if in a flood. The wedding-day, the scorn of
Olive Castlemaine, the black terror of hopeless darkness, the return to
whisky, the dissolution of Parliament, the telegram summoning him to his
constituency.

It all came to him with such a shock that for a moment his thirst left
him. The scenes of the previous evening filled him with horror. Yes, he
had been drinking hard all the day, and the whisky had proved too much
for him. He had walked to the Public Hall all right; but the hot, fetid
atmosphere, the sight of Olive Castlemaine's face thrown on the canvas
had completely overmastered him. Had he not given up drinking whisky it
would have been all right. He would have made his speech, and no one
would have suspected that he had been drinking; but as it was he had
become a maudlin fool, he had fallen down in drunken helplessness.

The thought stung him to madness. This, then, was his boasted strength;
this was what Radford Leicester had come to. The warnings of the pious
friends whom he had sneered at had come true. Whisky had made him as
drunk as a navvy who had spent his week-end in debauchery on receiving
his week's wage. Cynic as he had always been, even in his best hours, he
had also been always a proud man. He had professed contempt for the men
who had not been able to conquer the vices which disgraced them in the
eyes of the world. This pride had checked him from the vulgar indulgence
in sin, before he had met Olive Castlemaine. He had always acted and
spoken as a gentleman, even when he had drunk enough whisky to make
other men hopelessly incapable. However debauched he might have been by
the habit which chained him, he had always dressed with scrupulous care,
and he had never associated with those whom he regarded as low and
debased.

But now all had