er Audrey and Wyndham. In the
doorway of the dining-room he stepped on a small muslin
pocket-handkerchief. It was stained here and there with specks of blood.
He picked it up, kissed it, and put it in his pocket.

For a long time after that he had no clear sense of anything, except, at
times, of the misery that made the only difference between being drunk
and sober.

Yes; Hardy was carrying out the threat he had made to Audrey, with a
passionate deliberation. He was "giving his whole mind to it," as he had
said. He had been used to speak of the sins of his past life with that
exaggeration which was part of his character; they had been slight,
considering the extent of his temptation. Then he was, as it were, an
amateur in evil. Now he had an object in view--he was sinning for the
wages of sin.

After all, there was a boyish simplicity about Hardy; otherwise the idea
of living for a year alone on the Rockies, to make himself "fit to love
Audrey," would hardly have occurred to him. As it was, that guileless
scheme proved fatal in its results. The loneliness, the privation, the
excitement and fatigue of his sportsman's life--for with all his
boasting he was a true sportsman--had roused some old hereditary impulse
in his blood, and he found himself worsted by the craving for drink
before he was aware of its existence in him. But the thought of Audrey
was always present with him; and it kept him up. He fought himself hand
to hand, and won the fight ten times for once that he was beaten. He was
literally saved by hope. Happily for him, when he had finished the
stores he brought out with him, it was almost as difficult to satisfy
his craving as it was to annihilate it. When he came home the tendency
was sleeping in him still; and though, as long as he had hope, it might
have slept for ever, when hope was gone it was there, ready to take
possession of him. His love for Audrey was the strongest passion in his
nature. It filled the horizon of his life. He looked before and after,
and could see nothing else but it. It was of the kind that deepens
through its own monotony. Now that Audrey had cast him off, there was no
reason for the struggle, because there was nothing more to struggle for,
and nothing to live for unless it were to kill life in the act of
living. That indeed was something.

After the first month or so of it, he had no further interest in his
present course. He chose it now as the form of suicide least likely to