buried his face in the pillow, and
bit it with his teeth. It was more than grief, it was anguish, and it
refused to be choked. But presently it did leave him. It left him
quivering from head to foot, and in its place came another visitor. An
obsession, from which he shrank, surged suddenly, and claimed him for
its own. In a combat, of which his heart was the one dumb witness, he
battled with it. He struggled with it in a conflict that out-lasted
hours; but presumably he coped in vain. The next morning his face was
set as a captive's. In a fortnight he was in New York.

XV.

The return journey was unmarked by incident or adventure. Nothing less
than a smash-up on the railway or the wrecking of the ship would have
had the power to distract his thoughts. It may even be that his mind was
unoccupied, empty as is a vacant bier, and yet haunted by an
overmastering obsession. The ordinary functions of the traveller he
performed mechanically, with the air and manner of a subject acting
under hypnotic suggestion. One who crossed the ocean with him has since
said that the better part of the time the expression of his face was
that of utter vacuity. He would remain crouched for hours, in the same
position, a finger just separating the lips, and then he would start
with the tremor of one awakening from a debauch.

Mrs. Manhattan, who was returning with spoils from the Rue de la Paix,
asked him one afternoon, as he happened to descend the cabin-stair in
her company, where he had passed the winter.

"Yes, indeed," Tristrem answered, and went his way unconcernedly.

Mrs. Manhattan complained of this conduct to Nicholas, her husband,
alleging that the young man was fatuous in his impertinence.

"My dear," returned that wise habitue of the Athenaeum, "when a man gives
away seven million, it is because he has forgotten how to be
conventional."

It was on a Sunday that the ship reached New York, and it was late in
the afternoon before the passengers were able to disembark. Tristrem had
his luggage passed, and expressed to his grandfather's house, and then,
despite the aggressive solicitations of a crew of bandits, started
up-town on foot. In the breast-pocket of his coat he carried a purchase
which he had made in Naples, a fantastic article which he had bought,
not because he wanted it, but because the peddler who pestered him with
wares and offers happened to be the best-looking and most unrebuffably
good-natured scoundrel