If he had sold himself for bread that would have been more understandable, less reprehensible. Starvation was a very terrible thing. But he had sold himself--for what? He thought with weird dread and passion of that solemn, shining brown thing through the wall--the mysterious piece of ancient furniture that was responsible for his misery. And so, by desperate will, as he thought, he lived. He grew strong. The trained nurse went away. The last bottle of medicine was empty. He was alone and would be until the morning. This was the first evening he had been alone since his illness. At dusk the old familiar terror gripped him. He was beginning to be afraid, and this time he could not dart like a hunted creature into the streets and join his fellow-men--men whose bodies belonged to them; men who had not mortgaged their last sad majesty. He was alone, alone. On the shawl which wrapped his knees his folded hands looked oddly pale. He walked across the room and touched the cabinet. Long stay in bed had numbed his feet. He touched the cabinet. In his throat was a desperate sob. He would sell it. Sell! That was just what he could never do. But if only he could; if only he might buy himself back. Sell! He imagined the joy of the buyer--a collector, of course. What pure, undiluted ecstasy he would get out of it--that man who paid with gold and not with his own helpless flesh! No; he could never sell it. Beautiful, devilish, compelling thing! It must stay with him until the end. He opened the door and smelt the smell--the clinging aroma which had always tantalized and piqued him. He traced with his finger the rude hinges of hammered iron. His face quivered in every muscle with varied emotions. How he loved this thing! How he hated and feared it! What moments of joy it had afforded him! What a fearful league it had lured him into making! A terrible struggle was passing over him. His freakish brain had suggested a new extravagance. He was possessed with a desire to do this strange, this futile and dastardly act. He lifted his head and looked at the cabinet as he would have looked into human eyes--a long, wistful look; a look embodying a whole gamut of emotions. Then he crossed the room, stooped down to a box in one corner, and came back with a hammer. “It will hurt you,” he said foolishly, the hammer already uplifted, his eyes drinking in the delicacy of that wonderful thing which had traveled down the past ages and drifted to him and been his tempter, “but not as it hurts me.” He struck. All night he worked with the hammer, with every tool he had that could help him. He began to break it up, to hack it asunder--his cabinet. He threw it on the fire bit by bit. It blazed and crackled, this old dry wood. The splutter and crackle went to his heart. He thought they were agonized protests. He believed that it suffered as it died. In his long morbid communion with it he had grown to believe it human and something more.