“Better the worm of Izrail than Death that walks in form of life”—­that was for him.  He had substituted for death, swift, easy, a mere nothing, the long, slow terrific something.  Death that walks in form of life.  Deliberately he had chosen that.

“On thought itself feed not thy thought; nor turn
From Sun and Light to gaze
At darkling cloisters paved with tombs where rot
The bones of bygone days——­”

What else had he done since he had wandered in the wilderness?

“There is no Good, there is no Bad, these be
The whims of mortal will: 
What works me weal that call I ‘good,’ what harms
And hurts I hold as ‘ill.’”

These words drove out the pale Fantasy he had fallen down and worshiped.  It had harmed and hurt him.  Haji Abdu El-Yezdi bade him henceforth hold it as “ill.”  If he could only do that, would not gates open before him, would not, perhaps, the power to live again in a new way arise within him?

“Do what thy Manhood bids thee do, from
None but self expect applause;
He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes
And keeps his self-made laws.

All other Life is living Death, a world where
None but Phantoms dwell,
A breath, a wind, a sound, a voice, a tinkling
Of the Camel bell.”

He had lived the other life, for he had lived for another; he had lived to earn the applause of affection from Rosamund; he had striven always to fit his life into her pattern; now he was alone with the result.

“Pluck the old woman from thy breast:  be
Stout in woe, be stark in weal--       . . . . . . . spurn
Bribe of Heav’n and threat of Hell.”

He had chosen the death that walks in the form of life; now something powerful, stirred from sleep by the influence of one not dead, rose up in him to reject that death.  And it was the same thing that long ago had enabled him to be pure before his marriage, the same thing which had enabled him to put England before even Rosamund, the same thing which had held him up in many difficult days in South Africa, and had kept him cheerful and bravely gay through the long separation from all he cared for, the same thing which had begun to dominate Rosamund during those few short days at Welsley, the brief period of reunion in happiness which had preceded the crash into the abyss; it was the fiery spark of Dion’s strength which not all his weakness had succeeded in extinguishing, a strength which had made for good in the past, a strength which might make for evil in the future.

Did Mrs. Clarke know of this strength, and was she subtly appealing to it?

“Pluck the old woman from thy breast.”

Again and again Dion repeated those words to himself, and he saw himself, an ineffably tragic, because a weak figure, feebly drifting with his black misery through cities which knew him not, wandering alone, sitting alone, peering at the lives of others, watching their vices without interest, without either approval or condemnation, staring with dull eyes at their fetes and their funerals, their affections, their cruelties, their passions, their crimes.  He saw himself in a garden at Pera staring at painted women, neither desiring them nor turning from them with any disgust.  He saw himself—­as an old woman.  A smoldering defiance within him sent out a spurt of scorching flame.