For a space he drifted back into the vast sea of unconsciousness in which he had been submerged for so long.  Even that was bound to lead somewhere.  Surely there was no need to worry!

But very soon it ceased to be a calm sea.  It grew troubled.  It began to toss.  He felt himself flung from billow to billow, and the sound of a great storm rose in his ears.

He opened his eyes suddenly wide to a darkness that could be felt, and it was as though a flame of agony went through him, a raging thirst that burned him fiendishly.

Ah!  He knew the meaning of that!  It was horribly familiar to him.  He was back in hell—­back in the torture-chamber where he had so often agonized, closed in behind those bars of iron which he had fought so often and so fruitlessly to force asunder.

He stretched out his hands and one of them came into contact with the icy cold of a dead man’s face.  It was the man who had shot him, and who in his turn had been shot.  He shuddered at the touch, shrank into himself.  And again the fiery anguish caught him, set him writhing; shrivelled him as parchment is shrivelled in the flame.  He went through it, racked with torment, conscious of nought else in all the world, so pierced and possessed by pain that it seemed as if all the suffering that those dead men had missed were concentrated within him.  He felt as if it must shatter him, soul and body, dissolve him with its sheer intensity.  And yet somehow his straining flesh endured.  He came through his inferno, sweating, gasping, with broken prayers and the wrung, bitter crying of smitten strength!

Again the black sea took him, bearing him to and fro, deadening his pain but giving him no rest.  He tossed on the troubled waters for interminable ages.  He watched a full moon rise blood-red and awful and turn gradually to a whiteness of still more appalling purity.  For a long, long time he watched it, trying to recall something which eluded him, chasing a will-o’-the-wisp memory round and round the fevered labyrinths of his brain.

Then at last very suddenly it turned and confronted him.  There in the old-world garden that was every moment growing more distinct and definite, he looked once more upon his wife’s face in the moonlight, saw her eyes of shrinking horror raised to his, heard her low-spoken words:  “I shall never forgive you.”

The vision passed, blotted out by returning pain.  He buried his head beneath his arms and groaned. . . .

Again—­hours after, it seemed,—­the great cloud of his agony lifted.  He came to himself, feeling deadly sick but no longer gripped by that fiendish torture.  He raised himself on his elbows and faced the blinding moonlight.  It seemed to pierce him, but he forced himself to meet it.  He looked forth over the silent garden.

Strange silhouettes of shrubs weirdly fashioned filled the place.  At a little distance he caught the gleam of white marble, and there came to him the tinkle of a fountain.  He became aware again of raging thirst—­thirst that tore at the very root of his being.  He gathered himself together for the greatest effort of his life.  The sound of the water mocked him, maddened him.  He would drink—­he would drink—­before he died!