But it did not steady him, at least. When he sat down at the table, the hand he laid upon it shook.
He looked at it curiously, clinching and unclinching it.
"I'm pretty well done for when it goes like that," he said. "I'm farther gone than I thought. It's all over me—over and through me. I'm shaking like a fool."
He broke out with a torrent of curses.
"Is it me that's sitting here," he cried, "or some other chap? Is it me that luck's gone agen on every side or a chap that's useder to it?"
Among all his pangs of humiliation and baffled passion there was not one so subtle and terrible in its influence upon him as his momentary sense of physical weakness. He understood it less than all the rest, and raged against it more. His body had never failed him once, and now for the first time he felt that its power faltered. He was faint and cold, and trembled not merely from excitement but from loss of strength.
Opposite to him, at the other side of the room, was a full-length mirror. Accidentally raising his eyes toward it he caught sight of his own face. He started back and unconsciously glanced behind him.
"Who!" he began.
And then he stopped, knowing the face for his own—white-lipped, damp with cold sweat, lined with harsh furrows—evil to see. He got up, shaking his fist at it, crying out through his shut teeth.
"Blast her!" he said. "Who's to blame but her?"
He had given up all for her, his ambition, which had swept all before if, his greatest strength, his very sins and coarseness, and half an hour ago he had passed the open door of a room and had seen Murdoch standing motionless, not uttering a word, but with his face fairly transfigured
