soul was the quivering,
torturing flame of his passion. It would not be quenched; it would
not, in the least, be stilled; it drove him about the shabby little
room as if it were literally a flame from which he must try to
escape--though he knew he could not.

He had broken his heart over the disaster to Sheila's life, but as the
night advanced and his passion flared the fiercer in hours securely
dark and secret, self rose up within him and shrieked and cursed over
his own disaster.

He wanted her! He was forty-six years old; not too old to love, but
far, far too old to love calmly. The desires of half a lifetime were
in him, desires that had lain low and fed upon his years until, in
their accumulated strength, they were terrible--wild beasts that tore
him, fires that burned him to the bone. And they were strangely
compounded of instincts evil and lawless--when felt for another man's
wife--and longings wholly innocent and sweet.

For the first time he longed for a home. He looked about his tiny,
dingy room with a feeling of desolation, seeing in his mind so
different a place--a home with her. He longed for simple, innocent
things--her face across the table from him at his meals; her little
possessions scattered about with his; the sound of her step in the
rooms around him. And he longed to reach out in the night and touch
her; he longed to reach out in the night and take her into his arms.
He wanted--and now soul and flesh merged in one flame--he wanted her to
bear him a child.

Back and forth he paced, his nails digging into his palms, his teeth
cutting his lips, driven by the flame that could never be extinguished,
never be satisfied. And all the while, he pictured her in his arms; he
pictured her with his child at her breast.

Then, suddenly--and quite as plainly as if he were in the room--he saw
_Ted's_ child, and he staggered toward a chair and fell, sobbing, into
it.

How long those horrible sobs shook him he did not know. He felt
himself baffled, beaten, inconceivably tortured. He watched the gray
morning steal into the room as one who has kept a death vigil beside
his best-loved watches it. A new day had come, but there was no hope
in it for him. There was no hope for him--though his days should be
ever so many.

He fell asleep at last, sitting there in his uncomfortable chair, with
the cold light of the dawn creeping over his haggard face, and he
dreamed that Ted came into the room and said