Gradually the fever starts grew less, and calmness came back to him. With a wave of regret he looked back upon his lost serenity, and lamented that it had failed him. He knew that in his mental upheaval the opposing elements in his nature had waged a combat. The scientific tenor of his mind had for the past few weeks been crushed out by the virulence of his nerves. That physical force which he had so long held enthralled had at last asserted its supremacy, and for the time his mind was under the sway of bodily weakness. This duality of being occurred to him in perplexing inconsistency. Had he been a pure mentality, his life would have been one steep and victorious ascent towards knowledge. Were he but a physical organism, carnality would have satisfied his cravings. Then the remembrance that stronger than will or flesh is necessity arose and smote him into silence. Many of the people had gone, but he still sat plunged in thought. A hatless woman, fresh from a midnight carousal, with a bleeding cut upon her lip, took the seat beside him, and he found a forlorn comfort in the contact with alien wretchedness. When she laid her head upon the back of the bench and fell asleep, he listened to her drunken snores calmly and without aversion. He became aware that his old kinship to humanity was at the moment restored, that, losing it with the loss of desire, it was regained in despair. Suddenly the head of the woman beside him rolled forward and rested against his shoulder. She stirred slightly, heaved a sigh of satisfaction, and returned to her ribald dreams, while he, in numbness and pain, found consolation in this forced sacrifice of comfort. He did not move, and through the long night the drunken woman slept with her head upon his shoulder. For the next few days he dragged out a methodical existence. In the mornings he would force himself to rise, swallow his food, and take his accustomed seat before his desk. With a failing hand he would take up his pen and endeavor to bend his fever-stricken brain to its task, but before a dozen lines were penned his strength would falter and the effort be abandoned. Then he would rise and finger the phials on the shelf, until, turning from them, he would say, "I will fight--fight until the last gasp--and then--" At the beginning of the week, when his lodging bill was due, he carried by the armful a number of his books and pawned them for a nominal sum. Then he remembered his watch, and left that also. It was a heavy hunting-case of his father's, which he had always used from the nearness of the association, and as he laid it down something came into his throat. He opened the watch and took out the picture of his mother which was inside--a sketch in color, showing the lustrous Creole beauty in her first youth. Then he snapped the case and saw the initials "A. K. A." pass into the hands behind the counter.