That done, he poured himself out a dose far exceeding the normal allowance, and diluted it with the least admissible amount of water. He drank the mixture slowly, savouring its sweetness and warmth; its uncanny power to soothe and bless. But as he set down the glass revulsion took hold of him; and on the heels of revulsion came self-scorn. This last roused him like the prick of a spur: for to men of Eldred Lenox's calibre, self-respect is the oxygen of the soul. The spirit of his grandfather had "scored a point" to-night. But such an achievement must not be risked again. With the same deliberation that had marked all his former movements, Lenox picked up the bottle, emptied its sluggish contents down one of those primitive sluices that are to be found in every Indian bungalow, and returned, still absently holding it between his finger and thumb. A confession of weakness: there is no denying it. But let him who has not yet found the devil's chink in his own defences cast the stone. Head, heart, or heel--there is a weak spot in the strongest. Not even Achilles' self was plunged wholesale into the waters of immunity. Quite suddenly Lenox realised that he was still holding the bottle: and for some unfathomable reason the trivial detail acted as a fuse that fires the magazine. For the first time that night, unreasoning anger mastered him: anger against himself; against the whole tragi-comical scheme of things: against the man whose dead sins he was called upon to expiate in his own living flesh. A curse forced its way between his teeth; and he flung the unoffending scrap of glass into the open hearth, where it clinked and shivered into a hundred splinters, filling the room with the strong sickly odour of the drug. Then he went back again to the long chair; limbs and brain weighted with a luxury of weariness. Shattered hope; a life-and-death struggle ahead:--the words held no meaning for him now. His lids fell. The balm of Nirvana shrouded his senses, blotting out thought, as sea mists, rolling landward, obliterate all things. The June morning broke in one sheet of gold. Creeping in through the interstices of lowered "chicks," it emphasised the untidy, up-all-night aspect of the room; the sharp lines, pencilled by pain and struggle, on the sleeper's face, where he lay full length, in shirt-sleeves and scarlet waistcoat, unhooked and flung open before weariness overpowered him. A deep sound, persistently repeated, at last invaded and dispelled the drugged torpor of his brain: the voice of Zyarulla murmuring: "Sahib--Sahib," with the regularity of a minute-gun. Lenox stirred, yawned, and looked blankly about him, as though he had waked in another world. Then remembrance sprang at him, like a wild thing upon its prey: and his lids fell again heavily. In that first moment of consciousness he understood why men of proven honour and courage have been known to take liberties with the laws of life and death.