dominated his nature. He could
only express it. What was this house? For the first time the query
arose: What had he to do with a questionable evening?

"You are drunk, as usual," answered the woman with a pert upward motion
of disgust.

At this, which he knew to be a libel for once, Harland's hand tore at
his heart: a terrible rush of blood ran to his brain. The music hushed.
The dark dancing-girl sank with exhaustion to her rug. The room was
stifling. The air was heavy with the perfume of roses, and attar, and
wine. Yet the young man's head was poised, his eyes were sane, his
senses untouched. With a supreme effort he held his anger in check. The
beauty, not realizing the extent to which she had tortured him, laughed
aloud and contemptuously cried:

"Harland Slack, you are a coward. You dare not call your soul your own;
for you are always drunk. Bah!" She made as if to draw herself from
beyond his touch. He did not stir, but a frightful whiteness extended
over his hands and face.

"Go on," he said metallically.

With a refinement of insolence difficult to describe, ignoring his
person, she looked _through_ him, and with a gesture ordered the music
to begin again.

Harland stood motionless for a moment. Immovable, he fixed his gray eyes
upon a little black square of court-plaster under the lobe of her left
ear. The music crashed through the banquet-hall. The dancing-girl tried
to distract the man of stone. He looked at that little black patch. Its
wearer shrugged her shoulders significantly; then, as if wearied of the
thought of him, she moved her white arm to the table and took up a glass
flaming with champagne; waving it towards him she said malevolently:

"There! That's what you are waiting for. Drink and go!--Sot!" The
viciousness of the act and word served as the key to the situation. Like
rusting steel, Harland became unlocked. Oddly enough, at this crisis it
occurred to him to question whether this were his old friend at all.
Then who? Then what? Was the woman an embodiment of all the past evil of
his own soul? By some horrible law of metempsychosis had his old spirit
passed into this too fashionable married flirt at his side? That
outstretched, mocking hand--was it what the abstainers called the "demon
of drink?" How often he had laughed at the phrase, lighting his
cigarette with their tracts!

At the fearful import of these thoughts, he felt himself endowed by a
bidding higher than fate. Justice aro