Moret went off full of enthusiasm; the others were gloomy and preoccupied. Their great leader shut the door, and once more that night climbed the stairs to his chamber. As he reached it, the first streaks of morning came in through the parted curtains of the windows. The room, in the grey light with its half-empty glasses and full ashtrays, looked like a woman, no longer young, surprised by an unsympathetic dawn in the meretricious paints and pomps of the previous night. It was too late to go to bed; yet he was tired, weary with that dry kind of fatigue which a man feels when all desire of sleep has passed away. He experienced a sensation of annoyance and depression. Life seemed unsatisfactory; something was lacking. When all deductions had been made on the scores of ambition, duty, excitement, or fame, there remained an unabsorbed residuum of pure emptiness. What was the good of it all? He thought of the silent streets; in a few hours they would echo with the crackle of musketry. Poor broken creatures would be carried bleeding to the houses, whose doors terrified women would close in the uncharitable haste of fear. Others, flicked out of human ken from solid concrete earth to unknown, unformulated abstractions, would lie limp and reproachful on the paving-stones. And for what? He could not find an answer to the question. The apology for his own actions was merged in the much greater apology nature would have to make for the existence of the human species. Well, he might be killed himself; and as the thought occurred to him he looked forward with a strange curiosity to that sudden change, with perhaps its great revelation. The reflection made him less dissatisfied with the shallow ends of human ambition. When the notes of life ring false, men should correct them by referring to the tuning-fork of death. It is when that clear menacing tone is heard that the love of life grows keenest in the human heart. All men, from such moods and reflections, are recalled to earth by hard matters of fact. He remembered the proclamation he had to write, and rising plunged into the numerous details of the business of living, and thus forgot the barrenness of life. So he sat and wrote, while the pale glimmer of the dawn glowed into the clear light of sunrise and the warm tints of broad day. CHAPTER XIII. THE ACTION OF THE EXECUTIVE.