The casual eye and ear still recognized no difference in him.  There were days when he was as good-looking as ever, and much of the old fascination remained:  but to one who knew him well, as Harding did, there was no doubt that his life had passed its meridian.  The day was no longer at poise, but was quietly sinking; and though the skies were full of light, the buoyancy and blitheness that the hours bear in their ascension were missing; lassitude and moodiness were aboard.

More than ever did he seek women, urged by a nervous erethism which he could not explain or control.  Married women and young girls came to him from drawing-rooms, actresses from theatres, shop-girls from the streets, and though seemingly all were as unimportant and accidental as the cigarettes he smoked, each was a drop in the ocean of the immense ennui accumulating in his soul.  The months passed, disappearing in a sheer and measureless void, leaving no faintest reflection or even memory, and his life flowed in unbroken weariness and despair.  There was no taste in him for anything; he had eaten of the fruit of knowledge, and with the evil rind in his teeth, wandered an exile beyond the garden.  Dark and desolate beyond speech was his world; dark and empty of all save the eyes of the hound Ennui; and by day and night it watched him, fixing him with dull and unrelenting eyes.  Sometimes these acute strainings of his consciousness lasted only between entering his chambers late at night and going to bed; and fearful of the sleepless hours, every sensation exaggerated by the effect of the insomnia, he sat in dreadful commune with the spectre of his life, waiting for the apparition to leave him.

“And to think,” he cried, turning his face to the wall, “that it is this ego that gives existence to it all!”

One of the most terrible of these assaults of consciousness came upon him on the winter immediately on his return from London.  He had gone to London to see Miss Dudley, whom he had not seen since his return from Africa—­therefore for more than two years.  Only to her had he written from the desert; his last letters, however, had remained unanswered, and for some time misgivings had been astir in his heart.  And it was with the view of ridding himself of these that he had been to London.  The familiar air of the house seemed to him altered, the servant was a new one; she did not know the name, and after some inquiries, she informed him that the lady had died some six months past.  All that was human in him had expressed itself in this affection; among women Lily Young and Miss Dudley had alone touched his heart; there were friends scattered through his life whom he had worshipped; but his friendships had nearly all been, though intense, ephemeral and circumstantial; nor had he thought constantly and deeply of any but these two women.  So long as either lived, there was a haven of quiet happiness and natural peace in which his shattered spirit might rock at rest; but now he was alone.