ough
his imagination that he suffered, so that the horror was supreme. For
all the while, though Shame was there, his ideas were there too,
somewhere, the divine thoughts and the proud beautiful dreams, and the
great pure loves, winged and veiled; they stood a long way off and
turned away their faces from him, and that was the worst punishment he
had to bear.

Which meant that as Savage Keith Rickman lay in bed the morning after
that glorious April night, he knew that he had been making an April
fool of himself. He knew it by the pain in his head and other
disagreeable signs; also by the remarkable fact that he still wore the
shirt and trousers of the day.

And he knew that in spite of the pain he would have to get up and go
down to breakfast as if nothing had happened; he would have to meet
Mr. Spinks' eyes twinkling with malign intelligence, and Flossie's
wondering looks, and Mrs. Downey's tender womanly concern, as he
turned white over the bacon and the butter. He didn't know which were
worse, the knowing eyes or the innocent ones. He had to be at the shop
by nine o'clock, too, to force that poor, dizzy, aching head of his to
its eight hours' work.

In this unnerved, attenuated state, this mortal paleness of mind and
body, it was terrible to have to face the robust reality of
"Rickman's". At nine o'clock in the morning it was more real to him
than any real thing; it even assumed an abominable personality; it was
an all-compelling, all-consuming power that sucked from him his time,
his life, his energy, and for six days out of the seven required of
him his soul. That at the same time it provided him with the means of
bodily subsistence only added to the horror of the thing. It was as if
"Rickman's", destroyer and preserver, renewed his life every quarter
day that it might draw in, devour, annihilate it as before. There was
a diabolical precision in the action of the machine that made and
unmade him.

And yet, with its rhythm of days and weeks, it was in its turn part
of a vaster system, whose revolutions brought round a longer
pause--when for three days his soul would be given back to him. The
only thing that kept him up at this moment was the blessed hope of the
Bank holiday.

While young Keith was still lying very sick and miserable in his bed,
the elder Rickman, in his villa residence at Ilford in Essex, was up
and eager for the day. By the time Keith had got down to breakfast
Isaac had caught the early tra