doing; things that he could do; things that men died in
doing.

Reason said: Why not go and do them? And if he died! Well, what can a man
do more than die for his country?

And if Molly died?

Molly would not die. Something told him that. But he might break her
heart if he went. Yes; and he would certainly break his promises if he
stayed. Stanistreet was right there.

Her words came back to him: "It's all over and done with now." Was it?
Was it?

Reason said: It was better to risk a possibility than face a certainty.

Reason? Ah, no! It was Nature rather, the inscrutable Sphinx, repeating
her stale old riddle, the answer to which is Man.

A sound of laughter roused him from his communings with Reason.

The lights were going up one by one along the Embankment. In an embrasure
of the parapet a woman was leaning back against the low wall; she was
looking at him, and laughing open-mouthed. She stood near a gas-standard,
on the outer edge of an illuminated disc. Her face, painted and powdered,
flushed faintly in the perishing light. He thought her magnificently
beautiful.

He came forward and was about to speak to her. The woman moved quickly
into the bright center of the disc; she turned her face sideways as she
moved, and he saw in it a sudden likeness to Molly. The likeness was
fugitive, indefinable; something in the coloring, the line of the
forehead, the sweep of the black hair from the cheek; it might have
been a trick of the gaslight or of his own brain. But it was there; he
saw it, an infernal reincarnation of his wife's dead beauty.

And as he swerved out of her path the woman's laughter went after him,
with a ring in it of irony and triumph.

CHAPTER XXI

OUT OF THE NIGHT

That evening as he sat in his wife's bedroom--the perfunctory sitting,
lasting usually about a quarter of an hour--the thought took complete
possession of him. What if he went out to the Soudan? Other fellows
were going; they could never have too many. Men dropped off there faster
than their places could be filled. And if he died, as other fellows died?
Well, death was the supreme Artist's god from the machine, the simplest
solution of all tragic difficulties.

A gentle elegiac mood stole over him. He looked on at his own death; he
saw the grave dug hastily in the hot sand; he heard the roll of the Dead
March, and the rattling of the rifles. In all probability these details
would be omitted, but they helped to glorify th