sick." During the weeks that he was thus obsessed there was not a click
of the latch but sent his heart racing, while at the same time he did
not dare look up because in his heart he knew it would not be she he
saw. He slept little during this period, and looked a good six or seven
years older than his real age. This was succeeded by one of the phases
of numbness when partly reaction, because the mind cannot keep stretched
too tautly, and partly sheer physical fatigue from the hard work he
drove himself to every day, made for a merciful slough of the spirit in
which it all the time deceitfully gathered itself together for the next
onslaught.

That his instinct had always been to fight the intrusion of the
personal, that still it was so to the extent of a deadly clearness of
vision which prevented him thinking the affair of greater importance
than it was, did not prevent one shade of his pain; rather it was the
more acute for raging in spite of himself. He was powerless to do
anything but set his teeth and assure himself that it would eventually
pass. He looked at his suffering as a man may look at a broken leg: he
sees it stretched helpless before him; the pain from it ravages his
whole sense, but it is local, so that he can lay his hand upon it and
look from it to uninjured portions of his being which are yet
unconscious of immunity, so much is his whole sense occupied with the
one suffering portion.

Meanwhile Ishmael set himself to believe, or rather to realise--for he
never lost his feeling for values sufficiently ever to believe
otherwise--that all this would one day fall from off him; he even
thought that then he would be as he had been before, not yet knowing
that pain never leaves a man as it found him--that freshness of emotion
lost in any direction, it can never be recaptured. Meanwhile, now and