If the distressing theory that virtue is its own reward has any truth, surely sin is its own punishment. The old monotonous pains took Colonel Tempest. It is a popular axiom among persons in robust health that others labouring long under a painful disease become accustomed to it. It is perhaps as true as all axioms, however freely laid down by persons in one state respecting the feelings of others in a state of which they are ignorant, can be. The continual dropping of water wears away the stone. The stone ought, of course, to put up an umbrella--any one can see that--or shift its position. But it seldom does so. There was a continual dropping of a slowly diluted torture on the crumbling sandstone of Colonel Tempest's heart. The few months of intermission only rendered more acute the agony of the inevitable recommencement. As he felt in July after the fire in John's lodgings, so he felt now; just the same again, all over again, only worse. The porous sandstone was wearing down. He wandered like a ghost in the snowy places in the Park--for snow had followed the thaw--or paced for hours by the Serpentine, staring at the water. Once in a path across the Park he suddenly caught sight of John walking slowly in the direction of Kensington. The young man passed within a couple of yards of him without seeing him, his head bent, and his eyes upon the ground. "It is his ghost," said Colonel Tempest to himself, clutching the railing, and looking back at the receding figure with an access of shuddering horror. Another figure passed, a heavy man in an ulster. "He is being followed," thought Colonel Tempest. "It is Swayne, and he is following him." He rushed panting after the second figure, and overtook it at a meeting of the ways. "Swayne!" he gasped; "for mercy's sake, Swayne, don't----" A benevolent elderly face turned and peered at him in the twilight, and Colonel Tempest remembered that Swayne was dead. "My name is Smith," said the man, and after waiting a moment passed on. In a flash of memory Colonel Tempest saw Swayne's huddled figure crouching in the disordered bed, and the check trousers over a chair, and the candle on the window-sill bent double by the heat. That had been the manner of Swayne's departure. How had he come to forget he was dead, and that John was laid up at Overleigh? "I am going mad," he said to himself. "That will be the end. I shall go mad and tell everything."