his coat, and was about to fold and lay it
on the rug beside the bed, when something hard in one of the pockets
knocked against his knee. Searching, he found and drew forth a small
bottle which, for many a month past, had lain in the drawer of a table
where he had placed it on his return from the Soudan. It was an evil
spirit which sent this tiny phial to his hand at a moment when he had
paid out of the full treasury of his strength and will its accumulated
deposit, leaving him with a balance on which no heavy draft could be
made. His pulse quickened, then his body stiffened with the effort at
self-control.

Who placed this evil elixir in his pocket? What any enemy of his work
had done was nothing to what might be achieved by the secret foe, who
had placed this anodyne within his reach at this the most critical
moment of his life. He remembered the last time he had used it--in the
desert: two days of forgetfulness to the world, when it all moved by
him, the swarming Arabs, the train of camels, the loads of ivory, the
slimy crocodile on the sandbanks, the vultures hovering above unburied
carcasses, the kourbash descending on shining black shoulders,
corrugating bare brown bodies into cloven skin and lacerated flesh,
a fight between champions of two tribes who clasped and smote and
struggled and rained blows, and, both mortally wounded, still writhed in
last conflict upon the ground--and Mahommed Hassan ever at the tent door
or by his side, towering, watchful, sullen to all faces without, smiling
to his own, with dog-like look waiting for any motion of his hand or any
word.... Ah, Mahommed Hassan, it was he! Mahommed had put this phial in
his pocket. His bitter secret was not hidden from Mahommed. And this was
an act of supreme devotion--to put at his hand the lulling, inspiring
draught. Did this fellah servant know what it meant--the sin of it, the
temptation, the terrible joy, the blessed quiet; and then, the agonising
remorse, the withering self-hatred and torturing penitence? No, Mahommed
only knew that when the Saadat was gone beyond his strength, when the
sleepless nights and feverish days came in the past, in their great
troubles, when men were dying and only the Saadat could save, that this
cordial lifted him out of misery and storm into calm. Yet Mahommed must
have divined that it was a thing against which his soul revolted, or he
would have given it to him openly. In the heart and mind of the giant
murderer, how