could
not realize the menace, and the Doctor evidently meant that we should
not. He was in gayer spirits than he had been since the days of the
great discussions, and after the few facts he had brought back were
given us, he kept the talk on other matters, until the Sculptor, who
had been lying back in his chair, blowing smoke rings in the air,
stretched himself into his most graceful position, and called
attention even to his pose, before he threw his cigarette far from him
with a fine gesture, settled his handsome head into his clasped hands,
and began:

* * * * *

I had been ten years abroad.

In all that time I had been idle, prosperous, and wretched.

Every time Fate wrenched my heart with one of her long thin pitiless
hands, she recompensed me with what the world calls "good luck."
Every hope I had cherished failed me. Every faith I had harbored
deserted me. Every venture in which neither heart nor soul was
concerned flourished and flaunted its success in the face of the
world, where I was considered a very fortunate man.

In the ten years of my exile I had travelled much, had been in contact
with all kinds of people, had served some, and tried in vain to be
concerned for them while I served. If it had been my fate to make no
friends, it was within my choice to be never alone.

I had that in my memory which I hoarded, and yet with which I would
not allow myself to be deliberately alone. The most terrible hours of
my life were those when, toward morning, the rest of the world--all
the world save me--having no past to escape, no enticing phantom to
flee, went peacefully off to bed, and I was left alone in the night to
drug memory, fight off thought, outwit imagination by any means that I
might--and some of them were desperate enough.

Ten years had passed thus.

Another tenth of August had come round!

Only a man who has but one anniversary in his life, the backward and
forward shadows of which make an unbroken circle over the whole year,
can appreciate my existence. One cannot escape such a date. You may
never speak of it. You may forswear calendars, abjure newspapers,
refuse to date a letter; you may even lose days in a drunken stupor.
Still there is that in your heart and your brain which keeps the
reckoning. The hour will strike, in spite of you, when the day comes
round on the dial of the year.

I had been living for some time in a city far distant from my native
la