The movement was strangely like that of a feverish invalid turning from the ache of an opened shutter.
Durkin took up the newspaper once more, and unfolded it with listlessly febrile fingers.

It was the Paris edition of "The Herald," four days old.

Still again, and quite mechanically now, he read the familiar advertisement.

It was the same message, word for word, that had first caught his eye as he had sipped his coffee in the little palm-grown garden of the Hotel Bristol, in Gibraltar, nearly three weeks before.
"Presence of James L.Durkin, electrical expert, essential at office of Stephens & Streeter, patent solicitors, etc., Empire Building, New York City, before contracts can be culminated.

Urgent." Only, at the first reading of those pregnant words, all the even and hopeless monotony, all the dull and barren plane of life had suddenly erupted into one towering and consuming passion for activity, for return to his old world with its gentle anaesthesia of ever-widening plans and its obliterating and absolving years of honest labor.
He would never forget that moment, no matter into what ways or moods life might lead him.