But even at that moment of exhaustion the knife had been a talisman and a help.

He grasped the rough wooden handle, all too small for a Western hand, and he ran his fingers over the rough rust upon the blade, and the weapon spoke to him and bade him take heart, since once he had been put to the test and had not failed.

But long before he saw the white houses of Suakin that feeling of elation vanished, and the knife became an emblem of the vain tortures of his boyhood and the miserable folly which culminated in his resignation of his commission.

He understood now the words which Lieutenant Sutch had spoken in the grill-room of the Criterion Restaurant, when citing Hamlet as his example, "The thing which he saw, which he thought over, which he imagined in the act and in the consequence--that he shrank from.

Yet when the moment of action comes sharp and immediate, does he fail ?" And remembering the words, Harry Feversham sat one May night, four years afterwards, in Captain Willoughby's verandah, whittling away at the table with his knife, and saying over and over again in a bitter savage voice: "It was an illusion, but an illusion which has caused a great deal of suffering to a woman I would have shielded from suffering.