nded. He
saw himself as the thing that life had at last left him--a solitary and
unsatisfied man, a man without an aim, without a calling, without
companionship.

"So this ends the music!" he muttered, as he rose weakly to his feet.
And yet it was more than the end of the music, he had to confess to
himself. It was the collapse of the instruments, the snapping of the
last string. It was the ultimate end, the end that proclaimed itself
as final as the stabbing thought of his own death itself.

He heard Copeland asking if he would care for a glass of sherry.
Whether he answered that query or not he never knew. He only knew that
Binhart was dead, and that he himself was groping his way out into the
night, a broken and desolate man.

XX

Several days dragged away before Blake's mental clarity returned to
him. Then block by unstable block he seemed to rebuild a new world
about him, a new world which was both narrow and empty. But it at
least gave him something on which to plant his bewildered feet.

That slow return to the substantialities of life was in the nature of a
convalescence. It came step by languid step; he knew no power to hurry
it. And as is so often the case with convalescents, he found himself
in a world from which time seemed to have detached him. Yet as he
emerged from that earlier state of coma, his old-time instincts and
characteristics began to assert themselves. Some deep-seated inner
spirit of dubiety began to grope about and question and challenge. His
innate skepticism once more became active. That tendency to cynical
unbelief which his profession had imposed upon him stubbornly
reasserted itself. His career had crowned him with a surly
suspiciousness. And about the one thing that remained vital to that
career, or what was left of it, these wayward suspicions arrayed
themselves like wolves, about a wounded stag.

His unquiet soul felt the need of some final and personal proof of
Binhart's death. He asked for more data than had been given him. He
wanted more information than the fact that Binhart, on his flight
north, had fallen ill of pneumonia in New Orleans, had wandered on to
the dry air of Arizona with a "spot" on his lungs, and had there
succumbed to the tubercular invasion for which his earlier sickness had
laid him open. Blake's slowly awakening and ever-wary mind kept
telling him that after all there might be some possibility of trickery,
that a fugitive with the