Escape was impossible until the bestial sequence of his morning cure had run its course. Coming down the bedroom stairs into the club there was the disgusting and anxious consciousness that his movements were automatic and jerky, the real fear of meeting any one--the longing to bolt upstairs again and hide. Then a tremendous effort of will had forced him to go on. Facial control was--as ever--the most difficult thing. When he passed the waiters in the smoking room he must screw his face into the appearance of absorbed thought, freeze the twitching mouth and the flickering eyes into immobility. He had hummed a little tune as he had sat down at a table and ordered a brandy and soda, starting as if from a reverie when it was brought him, and making a remark about the weather in a voice of effusive geniality which embarrassed the well-trained servant. By lunch time the convulsive glances in the mirror, the nervous straying of the hand to the hair, the see-saw of the voice had all gone. Black depression, fear, self-pity, had vanished. The events of the night before became like a landscape seen through the wrong end of a telescope, far away, and as if they concerned some one quite other than himself. He had not exactly forgotten the shame of his behaviour at the Amberleys' house. But, as he always did after events of this sort, and they were becoming far more general than he realised, he had pushed the thought away in some attic of the brain and closed the door. He would have these memories out some day--soon. It would not be pleasant, but it must of course be done. Then he would put everything right with himself, destroy all these corpses, and emerge into the free sunlight for ever more. But not to-day. He must put himself _quite_ right to-day. When he _was_ right then he wouldn't have another drink all day. Yes! then by to-morrow, after a quiet, pensive night, he would throw off all his habits as if he were throwing an old pair of gloves over a wall. He knew well what he could do! He knew himself better than any one else knew him. But not to-day. "Inshallah Bukra!"--"Please God, to-morrow!" It had all seemed perfectly natural, though it happened over and over again, and to-morrow never came. He did not know that this was but one more definite symptom of his poisoned state, as definite as the shaking hand, the maudlin midnight invocations of God, the frequent physical nausea of the morning, even. And if the man is to be understood and his history to become real in all its phases, then these things must be set down truly and without a veil. It was a joy to watch her pleasure as they swung out of London in the twenty-horse power Ford he had hired. She did not say much but leant back on the luxurious cushions by his side. There was a dream of happiness upon her face, and Lothian also felt that he was living in a dream, that it was all part of the painted scenes of sleep.