’June 24.—­No more—­no more shall I drink wine from the hand of Ul-Jabal.  My knees totter beneath the weight of my lean body.  Daggers of lambent fever race through my brain incessant.  Some fibrillary twitchings at the right angle of the mouth have also arrested my attention.

’June 25.—­He has dared at open mid-day to enter my room.  I watched him from an angle of the stairs pass along the corridor and open my door.  But for the terrifying, death-boding thump, thump of my heart, I should have faced the traitor then, and told him that I knew all his treachery.  Did I say that I had strange fibrillary twitchings at the right angle of my mouth, and a brain on fire?  I have ceased to write my book—­the more the pity for the world, not for me.

’June 26.—­Marvellous to tell, the traitor, Ul-Jabal, has now placed another stone in the Edmundsbury chalice—­also identical in nearly every respect with the original gem.  This, then, was the object of his entry into my room yesterday.  So that he has first stolen the real stone and replaced it by another; then he has stolen this other and replaced it by yet another; he has beside stolen the valueless stone from the modern chalice, and then replaced it.  Surely a man gone rabid, a man gone dancing, foaming, raving mad!

’June 28.—­I have now set myself to the task of recovering my jewel.  It is here, and I shall find it.  Life against life—­and which is the best life, mine or this accursed Ishmaelite’s?  If need be, I will do murder—­I, with this withered hand—­so that I get back the heritage which is mine.

’To-day, when I thought he was wandering in the park, I stole into his room, locking the door on the inside.  I trembled exceedingly, knowing that his eyes are in every place.  I ransacked the chamber, dived among his clothes, but found no stone.  One singular thing in a drawer I saw:  a long, white beard, and a wig of long and snow-white hair.  As I passed out of the chamber, lo, he stood face to face with me at the door in the passage.  My heart gave one bound, and then seemed wholly to cease its travail.  Oh, I must be sick unto death, weaker than a bruised reed!  When I woke from my swoon he was supporting me in his arms.  “Now,” he said, grinning down at me, “now you have at last delivered all into my hands.”  He left me, and I saw him go into his room and lock the door upon himself.  What is it I have delivered into the madman’s hands?

’July 1.—­Life against life—­and his, the young, the stalwart, rather than mine, the mouldering, the sere.  I love life.  Not yet am I ready to weigh anchor, and reeve halliard, and turn my prow over the watery paths of the wine-brown Deeps.  Oh no.  Not yet.  Let him die.  Many and many are the days in which I shall yet see the light, walk, think.  I am averse to end the number of my years:  there is even a feeling in me at times that this worn body shall never, never