“Oh, not for Love?  Not even for Love?” broke the agonised question from me....

The next moment I had ceased, and ceased for ever, to resist.  Instantaneously the terrible flashing of that sword became no more than the play of lightning one sees far away in the wide cloudfields on a peaceful summer’s twilight.  I felt a gentle and overpowering sleep coming over me; and as it folded me about I saw, with the last look of my eyes, my own figure, busily writing at the table.

Had I, then, prevailed?  Had Pain so purged me that I was permitted to finish my task?  And had my tortured cry, “Oh, not even for Love?” been heard?

I did not know.

* * * * *

I came to myself to find that my head had fallen on my desk.  The light still shone within its pearly shade, and in the penumbra of its shadow the portrait of Andriaovsky occupied its accustomed place.  About me were my papers, and my pen lay where it had fallen from my hand.

At first I did not look at my papers.  I merely saw that the uppermost of them was written on.  But presently I took it up, and looked at it stupidly.  Then, with no memory at all of how I had come to write what was upon it, I put it down again.

It was indeed a completion.

But it was not of Andriaovsky’s “Life” that it was the completion.  As you may or may not know, Andriaovsky’s “Life” is written by “his friend John Schofield.”  I had been allowed to write, but it was my own condemnation that, in sadness and obedience, in the absence of wrath but also in the absence of mercy, I had written.  By the Law I had broken I was broken in my turn.  It was the draft for the fifth series of The Cases of Martin Renard.

No, not for Love—­not even for Love....