“But it’s a lie,” protested Perry with energy.  “I mean the whole damned business.”

“What isn’t?” demanded Adams bitterly, as he stuffed the crumpled paper into the pocket of his coat.  Then, stopping again as they reached a crossing, he held out his hand and enclosed Perry’s in a cordial grip.

“I’m very grateful to you,” he said; “but if you don’t mind, I think I’ll walk about a bit alone.  I’ve got to think things over.”  He hesitated a moment and then added quietly, “I know you’ll stand by me whatever comes?”

“Stand by you!” gasped Perry, and the sincere response of his whole impressionable nature brought two large, round tear drops to his eyes; “by Jove!  I’d stand it for you!”

For an instant Adams looked at him in silence, while his familiar smile flickered about his mouth.  Then he reached out his hand for another grip, before he turned away and walked rapidly into the dim light of the cross street.

“I must walk about and think things out a bit,” he found himself saying presently in his thoughts; “there’s a tangle somewhere—­I can’t pull it out.”

Stopping under a light he drew the newspaper from his pocket, but as he unfolded it, one of Connie’s wild letters to Brady flashed before his eyes; and crushing the open sheet in his hand, he flung it from him out into the gutter.  The darkness afforded what seemed to him a physical shelter for his rage, and as he turned toward it, he felt his first blind instinct for violent action give place to a kind of emotional chaos, in which he could barely hear the thunder of his own thoughts.  He knew neither what he believed nor what he suffered; his power to will and his power to think were alike suspended, and he was conscious only of a curious deadness of sensation, amid which his ironic devil, standing apart, asked with surprise why he did not suffer more—­why his anger was not the greater, his restraint the less?  His philosophy, at the moment, had turned to quicksand beneath his feet; and it was this utter failure of himself which forced upon him the anguish of readjustment, the frenzied striving after a clearer mental vision.  As he hurried breathlessly along the narrow, dimly lighted street into which he had turned, he felt instinctively that he was groping blindly for some way back into his former illumination, for some finer knowledge of spirit, which at present he did not appear to possess.  Not to act upon brute impulse, but to listen in agony until he heard the voice of reason above the storm of his passion—­until he heard the soul speaking beyond the senses—­this was the one urgent need he felt himself to be aware of—­the one intelligent purpose that remained with him through his flight.