and began:

* * * * *

I had been ten years abroad.

In all that time I had been idle, prosperous, and wretched.

Every time Fate wrenched my heart with one of her long thin pitiless
hands, she recompensed me with what the world calls "good luck."
Every hope I had cherished failed me. Every faith I had harbored
deserted me. Every venture in which neither heart nor soul was
concerned flourished and flaunted its success in the face of the
world, where I was considered a very fortunate man.

In the ten years of my exile I had travelled much, had been in contact
with all kinds of people, had served some, and tried in vain to be
concerned for them while I served. If it had been my fate to make no
friends, it was within my choice to be never alone.

I had that in my memory which I hoarded, and yet with which I would
not allow myself to be deliberately alone. The most terrible hours of
my life were those when, toward morning, the rest of the world--all
the world save me--having no past to escape, no enticing phantom to
flee, went peacefully off to bed, and I was left alone in the night to
drug memory, fight off thought, outwit imagination by any means that I
might--and some of them were desperate enough.

Ten years had passed thus.