Whether it was minutes or hours which passed then, he never knew in the days which followed. Time is not measured by common reckoning on the hill of Calvary. The thing which brought him from under the blow at last was a blinding rage. He wanted to take a revolver and blow his brains out, then and there. He--a man supposed to have a mind! _He_--counted a master of those very things! And now, what? Manhood, power, _himself_ gone. Stumbling through his days! Useless!--a curse to himself and everyone else. Groping about in the dark--a thing to be pitied and treated well for pity's sake! Cared for--looked after--_helped!_ That beat down the bounds of control. He did things then which he never remembered and would not have believed. It all rushed upon him--the birthday night--the crafty, insidious mockery through every bit of it, until everything to which he had held tottered about him, and goaded beyond all power to bear there came a slow, comprehending, soul-deep curse on the world and all that the world had done. And then, out of the darkness, through the blackened, dizzying, tottering mass--a voice, a face, a smile, a touch, a kiss, and the curses gave way to a sob and things steadied a little. No, not the world and everything it had done, for it was a world which held Ernestine, a world which had given Ernestine to him for his. He fought for it then: for his faith in the world, his belief in the things of love. It was the fight of his life, the fight for his own soul. Come what might in the future, it was this hour which held the decisive battle. For if he could not master those things which were surging upon him, then the things which made him himself were gone for all time. And when sense of the underlying cunning of the blow brought the surrendering laugh close to his parched lips it was held back, held under, by that ever recurring memory of a touch, a voice, a face. It was Ernestine, their love, fighting against the powers of damnation for the rescue of his soul. Even in the battle's heat, he had full grasp of the battle's significance, knew that all the future hung upon making it right this hour with his own soul. His face grew grey and old, he concentrated days of force into minutes, but little by little, through a strength greater than that strength with which men conquer worlds, a force greater than the force with which the mind's big battles are won, by a force not given many since the first of time, he held away, beat back, the black tides ready to carry him over into that sea of bitterness from which lost souls send out their curses and their jeers and their unmeetable silences.