d the temptation, can't conceive of what it means. It's a
living actuality, this lust for drink. When your nerves go wrong, even
at the end of a day, or a week, or a year, during which you've kept
straight, when you're tired, discouraged, and, above all, _alone_!--then
it comes at you like a live thing,--speaks--grips your arm--drags you
wherever it wills! I've laughed at it, scoffed at it, in its absence,
tried to make myself believe it a fragment of an otherwise forgotten
dream, many and many and many a time. _But it always came back!_ Oh,
John Barclay, you others will never understand! A man has to have been
through it, in order to know, and that not once, but, as I have, a
hundred times."

"I can well believe it to be a tremendous temptation," said the
Lieutenant-Governor gravely.

"Temptation? It's more than that! A temptation gives you _some_ chance,
doesn't it? You may yield to it, but, at least, you've had your
fighting-chance. Well, in that sense, this is no temptation, though I've
been using the word myself to describe it. Why, John, it's madness,
sheer insanity. You probably remember that I never used to touch alcohol
at all. I promised my poor mother to let it alone until I reached my
majority. Of course, I didn't realize about the dear old man; he died
when I was too young for that. But her one great fear, and naturally,
was that the curse had descended to me--just as it had! Well, I stuck to
my promise till I was twenty-one, and kept along in the same way for
some time afterwards, just because there didn't seem to be any
particularly good reason for taking up something which I had managed to
get along very well without, all my life. Then came that time, you
know--three years ago--and out of mere recklessness, bravado, God knows
what, I began to drink. John, I was a doomed man from the first swallow!
That demon had been hiding inside me, without sound or movement or other
hint of his presence, for twenty-eight years--just waiting his chance!
You know the rest. The fight has been going on ever since, and the thing
has beaten every time. I've resisted. I've struggled. I've even prayed.
It's all useless."

He pointed significantly to the curtain which hung where the door of the
wine-closet had been.

"As I did that night," he continued, "I shall do again, and still again,
until the end. It's insanity, nothing more or less. It lurks at the back
of my brain--always--always--and then, suddenly, when I am leas