Scenes of his boyhood, the panorama of his young manhood, pictures of his battle for success against overwhelming forces in the great city. These pictures returned again and again, vivid in their relief. He saw again the death of his wife and the spirit of darkness that had then come to walk beside him, taunting him that now he was of necessity a cold, calculating, lonely, indomitable man, not knowing how to give to his only son fatherly tenderness. This phase passed. He seemed to enter into a larger world full of terrifying monsters, all of human form. One he recognized as Druce, another as Anson, a third as the senator whose seat he had helped to get. And with them came a host of smaller figures, some struggling for life, and being crushed down into oblivion under his inexorable progress, some fighting with one another lest they too be torn down and crushed before him. There were piteous girl faces and worn kindly faces of women and men and these had gone down before the others because they had not the power of resistance needed in this battle. It was a great whirling nightmare of continuous struggle. And always walking by his side and seeming to grow stronger and more terrible as he tore his path through every obstacle strode his guide, the spirit of darkness. At last they were alone, he and the spirit. And the spirit turned upon him and clutched him by the throat. He struggled in that grasp just as others had struggled in his own grasp, tortured and futile. And again those words from Grogan: _"You can't beat Nature and you can't beat God!"_ Sweat stood out on John Boland's forehead. He awoke with a mighty effort and sat upright. Around him was the emptiness and loneliness of the great bed-chamber. He saw with eyes wide open and brain alert a picture that looked like a reality and not a vision. It was of a trembling man bent with age and loneliness. CHAPTER XXIX THE CALL OF ETERNITY Elsie walked on and on eastward towards the lake. For a week she had been living alone in a room she had found near the park on the night that she left Harvey Spencer, telephoning in the drug-store. She had resolved that instant to go. It was to be "Now or never"--and she hurried away in an opposite direction from the hiding place--and from Druce. The little money that he had put in her hands for drugs had somehow lasted her until now. She had been too ill to go out, her body racked with fever. She was conscious that she must tomorrow find some work to do, for the landlady had twice asked her for the next week's rent. She looked in at the door of a laundry where a German woman was singing as she ironed children's dresses by the light of a flaring gas jet. It looked pleasant and peaceful in there. Perhaps that motherly woman would let her work with her. She would see tomorrow.