, who was
fighting the last grim fight against starvation. He spoke in a whisper,
for his voice was almost gone.

"How do you know that I shall come back?"

"I am content to risk it," the sub-editor answered, smiling. "Come back
in an hour's time and ask for Mr. Rawlinson."

Douglas staggered out, speechless. There was a sob sticking in his
throat and a mist of tears before his eyes.

CHAPTER XII

THE MAN WHO NEARLY WENT UNDER

At midnight a man sat writing at a desk in a corner of a great room full
of hanging lights, a hive of industry. All around him was the clicking
of typewriters, the monotonous dictation of reporters, the tinkling of
telephone bells. When they had set him down here, they had asked him
whether the noises would disturb him, but he had only smiled grimly.
They brought him pen and paper and a box of cigarettes--which he
ignored. Then they left him alone, and no sound in the great room was
more constant than the scratching of his pen across the paper.

As the first page fluttered from his fingers he bent for a moment his
head, and his pen was held in nerveless fingers. Since he had come to
London, sanguine, buoyant, light-hearted, this was the first time he had
written a line for which he expected payment. The irony of it was borne
in upon him with swift, unresisting agony. This was the first fruit of
his brain, this passionate rending aside of the curtain, which hung like
a shroud before the grim horrors of that seething lower world of misery.
In his earlier work there had been a certain delicate fancifulness, an
airy grace of diction and description, a very curious heritage of a man
brought up in the narrowest of lines, where every influence had been a
constraint. There was nothing of that in the words which were leaping
now hot from his heart. Yet he knew very well that he was writing as a
man inspired.

That was his only pause. Midnight struck, one and two o'clock, but his
pen only flew the faster. Many curious glances were cast upon him, the
man in rags with the burning eyes, who wrote as though possessed by some
inexorcisable demon. At last Rawlinson came softly to his side and took
up a handful of the wet sheets. He was smoking a cigarette, for his own
labours were nearly over, but as he read it burned out between his
fingers. He beckoned to another man, and silently passed him some of
the sheets. They drew a little on one side.

"Wonderful," the other man whispered, in a tone of r