The blood drummed in Mendel's temples. Logan's cold finger went probing into his life too, and showed him always casting his own shadow over his passions. In love it was the same as in art. . . . It was very odd that, with every nerve at stretch to understand Logan and how he had been brought to smash the clotted passion of his life, it should only be important to understand himself, and that he should be able to understand so coldly, so clearly, so easily. And now the presence of the policeman became a relief. It was a guarantee that the whole visible world would not be swept away by the frozen will in Logan, which was like a floe of ice bearing everything with it, nipping at Mendel's life, squeezing it up high and dry and bearing it along. He felt that if the policeman were to go away he would be drawn down into the doom that was upon Logan, into the valley of the shadow, even while the good sun came streaming in through the tall windows. . . . He had lost all the emotional interest which had kept him awake through the night. . . . It had been simple enough. There had been himself, Logan and Oliver, three people, living in London the gay, reckless life of artists in London, a city so huge that men and women could do in it as they pleased. Oliver and he had hated each other, and Logan had had to choose between them. He had chosen wrongly and had put an end to his misery in the only possible way. Mendel fought back out of the shadow--back to the policeman, and the sick men lying in the rows of beds, and the dead man lying in the bed which had just been surrounded by a screen, and the simple, wonderful people in the waiting-room downstairs, and the sun streaming through the windows, and the teeming life outside in London--wonderful, splendid London, the very heart of the world. . . . It was well for Logan to lose sight of these things. He was a dying man. But Mendel was alive, never more alive than now, in face of the shadow of death, and he would not think the thoughts of a dying man unless they could be shaped in the likeness of life. He gathered together all his forces, summoned up everything that urged him towards life and towards art, and of his own strong living will plunged after Logan, no longer in obedience to Logan's frozen purpose, but as a friend giving to his friend the meed that was due to him. He took Logan's hand and pressed it, and chafed it gently to make it warm, and Logan smiled at him, and an expression of anguish came into his face as the warmth of his friend wrapped him round, penetrated him, thawed and melted his purpose, with which he had lived for so many empty, solitary days until it had driven him to make an end. The coldness in his friend touched Mendel's heart and was like a stab through it, and he felt soon a marvellous release, as if his blood were flowing again, and it seemed that the weaknesses on which Logan had laid his finger were borne down with him into the shadow.