and struck
his left palm with his clenched right hand.

"I tell you, Hastings, to have fought this thing, in whatever way, has
been a task that called for every ounce of strength I had. I've lived in
hell and walked with devils, against my will. Not a day, not a night,
have I been free of this curse, or my fear of it. There have been times
when, every night for months, my slumbers were broken or impossible! The
devilish thing reached down into the depths of sleep and with its foul
and muddy grasp poisoned even those clear, white pools--clear and white
for other men! But no matter----

"You've heard of obsessions--of men seized every six months with an
irresistible desire to drink--of kleptomaniacs who, having all they need
or wish, must steal or go mad--of others driven by inexplicable impulse,
mania, to set fire to buildings, for the thrill they get out of seeing
the flames burst forth. Well, from my earliest childhood until that
moment when Roy Dalton attacked me, I had fought an impulse even more
terrible than those. God, what a tyranny! It drove me, drove me, that
obsession, at times amounting to mental compulsion, to strike, to stab,
to make the blood flow!"

He rose, getting to his feet slowly, so that his burly bulk gained in
size, like the slow upheaval of a hillside. Swollen as his face had
been, it expanded now a trifle more. His nostrils coarsened more
perceptibly. The puffiness that had been in the back of his neck
extended entirely around his throat. He hung forward over the table,
giving all his attention to Hastings, who was unmoved, incredulous.

"The Brace woman will tell you I had to kill him," he proceeded more
swiftly, displaying a questionable ardour, like a man foreseeing defeat.
"The mistake I made was in running away--a bitter mistake! But those
unnecessary wounds, twenty-eight that need not have been made! The
obsession to see the blood flow drove me to acts which a jury, I
thought, would not understand. And, if you don't see the force of my
explanation, Hastings, if you don't understand, I shall be in little
better plight--after all these years!"

He put, there, a sorrowful appeal into his voice; but a sly
contradiction of it showed faintly in his face, a hint that he took a
crafty pleasure in dragging into the light the depravity he had kept in
darkness for a lifetime.

"I got away. I drifted to Virginia, working hard, studying much. I
became a lawyer. But always I had that affliction t