It would be the last degree of insult. Whatever she did, she wouldn’t subject me to that. It would be worse than her glove across the face. It was out of the question. I couldn’t bear to think of it. Rather than think of it, I went over the probabilities that she would come back with the smile of forgiveness. It would doubtless be a tearful smile, for tears were surely the cause of her delay. When she had controlled them, when she was able to speak and bid me be of good comfort, I should hear the tap of her high heels coming down the uncarpeted stairway. No red Indian ever listened for the tread of a maid’s moccasins on forest moss so intently as I for that staccato click. But only the birds rewarded me, and the cries of boys who had come to bathe on the beach below. There was more gold in the light; more trilling in the branches; a more pungent scent from the trees, the flowers, and the grass; and that was all. It was half past five; it was a quarter to six; it was six. At six o’clock I knew. My hat was lying on a chair near by. I picked it up—and went. I went, not by the avenue and the path, but down the queer, rickety flights of steps that led from one jutting rock to another over the face of the cliff, till I reached the beach. It was a broad, whitish, sandy beach, with a quietly lapping tide almost at the full. Full tide was marked a few feet farther up by a long, wavy line of seaweed and other jetsam. It was the delicious hour for bathing. As far as one could see in either direction there were heads bobbing in the water and people scrambling in and out. Shrill cries of women and children, hoarse shouts of men, mingled with the piping of birds overhead. Farther out than the bathers there were rowboats, and beyond the rowboats sails. In the middle of the Sound a steamer or two trailed a lazy flag of smoke. Far, far to the south and the west a haze like that round a volcano hung over New York. I should return there next day to face new conditions. I only wished to God that it could be that night. The new conditions were, briefly, three: I could use the revolver still lying in my desk; or I could begin to drink again; or, like the bull wounded in the ring, I could seek shelter in the dumb sympathy of the Down and Out. The last seemed to me the least attractive. I had climbed that hill, and found it led only to a precipice that I had fallen over. Neither did the first possibility charm me especially. Apart from the horror of it, it was too brief, too sudden, too conclusive. I wanted the gradual, the prolonged. It was the second course to which my mind turned with the nearest approach to satisfaction. Christian had told me that some of my severest tussles lay ahead; and now I had come to the one in which I should go under. In that the flesh at least would get its hour of compensation, when all was said and done. At the foot of Mrs. Grace’s steps I paused to recall Christian’s words of a few days previously: