The nurse came in for the tray and he asked her to switch off the light.  He lay for hours, open-eyed, in the gloom, while wraithlike memories materialized and vanished as mysteriously.  Somehow the incidents of his life nearest in point of time seemed the remotest.  Only his youth lay within easy reach, and his childhood nearest of all.  He was traveling back ... back ... perhaps in the end

oblivion would wrap him in its healing mantle and he would wait to be made perfect and whole again in the flaming crucible of a new birth...  Gradually the mists of remembrance faded, lost their outline ... became confused, and he slept.

He awoke with a shiver.  A piercing scream was curdling the silence.  From the other side of the thin partition came shrieks, curses, mad laughter.  He heard the heavy tramp of attendants in the hallway ... doors quickly opened and slammed shut. ...  There followed the sounds of scuffling, the reeling impact of several bodies against the wall ... then blows of shuddering softness, one last shriek ... dead silence!

He sat up in bed—­alive and quivering.  Was this the rebirth that the swooning hours had held in store for him? ...  Quickly life came flooding back.  Indifference fell from him.  In one blinding flash his new condition was revealed.  His life had been a futile compromise.  He had sowed passivity and he had reaped a barren harvest of negative virtues.  He would compromise again, and he would be passive again, and he would bow his neck to authority ... but from this moment on he would wither the cold fruits of such enforced planting in a steadily rising flame of understanding.  He knew now the meaning of the word “revelation.”

CHAPTER XI

They kept Fred Starratt in bed for two weeks, and one morning when the sun was flooding through the skylight with soul-warming radiance they brought him his clothes and he knew that the prologue to the drama of his humiliation was over.  He crawled to his feet and looked down upon his body wasted by days of enforced idleness and fasting.  He dropped back upon the bed, exhausted.  The sun, striking him squarely, gradually flamed him with feeble energy.  He straightened himself and dressed slowly.

When he had finished the sun still poured its golden shower into the room.  He rose to his feet and lifted his chilled hands high to receive its blessing.  He felt the blood tingle through his transparent fingers.

In the next room he heard the tramping of feet and a feeble curse or two.  He dropped his hands and sat down again.  The nurse came in with his breakfast.

“The man next door?” he asked.  “Is he leaving to-day, too?”

“Yes.”

“Where does he go?”

“To Fairview.”

A memory of that first night with its piercing terror sent a shiver through him.

“They brought him in the same day I came,” he ventured, half musingly.  “At the beginning he made a lot of noise, but lately...”