I accepted it.

I accepted the third likewise; and I have told you about the fourth....

I have tried to kill _Martin Renard_. He was killing me. I have, in
the pages of the _Falchion_, actually killed him; but I have had to
resuscitate him. I cannot escape from him....

I am not setting down one word more of this than bears directly on my
tale of Andriaovsky's "Life." For those days, when my whole future had
hung in the balance, _were the very days covered by that portion of
Andriaovsky's life at which I had now arrived_. I had reached, and was
hesitating at, our point of divergence. Those checks and releases which I
had at first found so unaccountable corresponded with the vicissitudes of
the _Martin Renard_ negotiations.

The actual dates did not, of course, coincide--I had quickly discovered
the falsity of that scent. Neither did the intervals between them, with
the exception of those few days in which I had been unable to complete
that half-written sentence--the few days immediately prior to my
(parallel) acceptance by the _Falchion_. But, by that other reckoning
of time, of mental and spiritual experience, _they tallied exactly_.
The gambling chances of five years ago meant present stumblings and
haltings; the breach of faith of an editor long since meant a present
respite; and another week should bring me to that point of my so
strangely reduplicated experience that, allowing for the furious mental
rate at which I was now living, would make another node with that other
point in the more slowly lived past that had marked my acceptance of the
offer for the second half-dozen of the _Martin Renards_.

It had been on this hazardous calculation that I had made my promise to
Maschka.

I passed that week in a state of constantly increasing apprehension.
True, I worked at the "Life," even assiduously; but it was plain sailing,
mere cataloguing of certain of Andriaovsky's works, a chapter I had
deliberately planned _pour mieux sauter_--to enhance the value of the
penultimate and final chapters. These were the real crux of the "Life."
These were what I was reserving myself for. These were to show that only
his body was dead, and that his spirit still lived and his work was
still being done wherever a man could be found whose soul burned within
him with the same divine ardour.

But I was now realising, day by day, hour by hour more clearly, what I
was incurring. I was penning nothing less than my own artistic damnatio