What moved in the bottom of his mind it would be hard to say.

He thought that he loved the man sitting over against him, and so, surely, to some great amount he did.

But somewhere, in the thousand valleys behind them, he had stayed in an inn of malice and had carried hence poison in a vial as small as a single cell.

What suddenly made that past to burn and set it in the present it were hard to say.

A spark perhaps of envy or of jealousy, or a movement of contempt for Alexander's "fortune." But he looked at his friend with half-closed eyes, and under the sea of consciousness crawled, half-blind, half-asleep, a willingness for Glenfernie to find some thorn in life.