CHAPTER III.
THE SHADOWING PAST Durkin's first tangible feeling was a passion to lose and submerge himself in the muffling midnight silences, the silences of those outwardly quiet gardens at heart so old in sin and pain.
He felt the necessity for some sudden and sweeping readjustment, and his cry for solitude was like that of the child wounded in spirit, or that of the wild animal sorely hurt in body.

Before he could face life again, he felt, he had to build up about him the sustaining fabric of some new and factitious faith.
But as intelligence slowly emerged from the mist and chaos of utter bewilderment, as reason crept haltingly back to her seat, his first blind and indeterminate rage fell away from him.

His first black and blinding clouds of suspicion slowly subsided before practical and orderly question and cross-question.

Thought adjusted itself to its new environment.

Painfully, yet cautiously, he directed his ceaseless artillery of interrogation toward the outer and darker walls of uncertainty still so blankly confronting him.
It was not that he had been consumed by any direct sense of loss, of deprivation.