u make up
your mind to have done with it altogether?

'Sir,' said Mr. Warr with intense solemnity, 'if I thought I had tasted
my last liquor, I'd cut my throat.'

'If ever I find myself disposed to feel like that,' Paul answered, 'I
will cut my own.'

'Oh dear no, you won't, sir,' said Mr. Warr. 'If ever you go that way at
all, you'll slide into it. You will always believe that you could drop
it at any moment until you find you can't. Then you'll be reconciled,
like the rest of us.'

Paul had little fear. His temptation, he told himself, did not lie in
that direction.

CHAPTER X

Darco's work fell into routine for a time. The wheels of all his
affairs went so smoothly that he and his assistant found many easy
breathing-spaces. But Paul was of a mind just now to scorn delight and
live laborious days. He confined himself for many hours of each day to
his bedroom, and on the weekly railway journey with his chief he sat
for the most part in a brown study, And made frequent entries in a big
note-book.

'Vat are you doing?' Darco asked one day.

Paul blushed, and answered that he would rather wait a day or two before
speaking.

'I shall ask your opinion in a week at the outside,' he added.

Darco went to sleep, a thing he seemed able to do whenever the fancy
took him, and Paul made notes furiously all through the rest of the
journey. His ideas affected him curiously, for at times his eyes would
fill and he would blow his nose, and at other times he would chuckle
richly to himself. He had got what he conceived to be a dramatic notion
by the tip of the tail, and he was engaged in the manufacture of
his first drama. In due time the result of his labours in his most
clerk-like hand was passed over a breakfast-table to Darco, who winced,
and looked like a shying horse at it.

'Vot is id?' he asked.

'It is a play,' said Paul, blushing and stammering. 'I want to have your
judgment on it.'

'Dake it away!' cried Darco; 'dake it away. I am wriding blays myselluf,
ant I will nod look at other beoble's. No. Dake it away!'

Paul stared at him in confusion.

'I do not vant to look at anypoty's blays,' said Darco. 'I haf got
alreaty all the tramatic iteas there ever haf been in the vorldt--all
there efer will be. I do not vant notions that are olter than the hills
brought to me, and then for beobles to say I haf zeen their pieces
and gopied from them. I do not vant to gopy from anypoty. I am Cheorge
Dargo.'