and the brown hand shut on the papers was strong. Tempest looked at him, feeling the vigour and virility in him, and in one blinding flash, realisation leapt to him. It was Dick who had done this thing to him. Dick, his friend, who had done it—knowingly, secretly, wilfully.
He went giddy for a moment, and put his hand on the wall. Then he thrust past, speaking thickly.
"No," he said. "Leave them." And he walked into the office, and turned the key on himself.
The yellow and egg-shell blue went out of the sky. Dick went upstairs, whistling, to pack his kit for a three-days' trip to Lower Landing. Light drew back from the zenith, leaving it naked to the stars, and across the river the dark pine-forest settled into night.
But the night of the soul was on Tempest in the little bare, cold office where he sat still, staring at the wall. All round him were the maps, the blue books, the filed memoranda, the pencils, pens and rulers of his work. He had come back to that work as Dick would have gone in like case to the forest. Come back, blindly, unconsciously, that it might help him through with his pain; that work which had once meant most of all to him; that work which he had forsaken for a personal and private love, and which had its grip on all his fibres still. It reproached him now; cruelly and bitterly. It mocked at him, asking what life had given him in place of it. A friend? Aye; a friend who had faced death with him, and had now delivered him to worse than death. A woman to love? Yes, and his right to love her was taken from him, and his prayer that he might guard her denied.
Twice Poley came to the door, intimating the advisability of meals. But Tempest had one answer only for him.
"I cannot be disturbed. I am busy," he said, and went on sitting motionless in his chair and staring at the hazy maps on the wall. Later he heard Dick and Kennedy going to bed in the room at the head of the stairs. Dick was in a wild and reckless mood, and Kennedy's bellowing laugh broke loose in strangled sputters more than once. Then night and stillness dropped on Grey Wolf, and still Tempest sat in his chair, staring at the wall.
A man had once said of Tempest that he had reduced
