And now all that remained for him was to slip quietly and unprotestingly into the current which clawed and gnawed at his feet.

He had been tried too long; the test, from the first, had been too crucial.

He might, in time, even find some solacing thought in the fitness between the act and its environment--here he could fling himself into an obliterating Niagara, not of falling waters, but of falling men and women.

Yes, it was a stage all prepared and set for the mean and sordid and ever recurring tragedy of which he was to be the puppet.

For close about him seethed and boiled, as in no other place in the world, all the darker and more despicable passions of humanity.