But the Onlooker was no dreamer, and he saw her about three times a week. He saw how the light of life that his lying lips had blown out was not to be rekindled by his or any man's breath. He saw her slenderness turn to thinness, the pure, healthy pallor of her rounded cheek change to a sickly white, covering a clear-cut mask of set endurance. And there was no work that could shut out that sight--no temptation of the world, the flesh, or the devil to give him even the relief of a fight. He had no temptations; he had never had but the one. His soul was naked to the bitter wind of the actual; and the days went by, went by, and every day he knew more and more surely that he had lied and thrown away his soul, and that the wages of sin were death, and no other thing whatever. And gradually, little by little, the whole worth of life seemed to lie in the faint, far chance of his being able to undo the one triumphantly impulsive and unreasoning action of his life. But there are some acts that there is no undoing. And the hell that had burned in his heart so fiercely when he had seen her in the other man's arms burned now with new bright lights and infernal flickering flame tongues. And at last, out of hell, the Onlooker reached out his hands and caught at prayer. He caught at it as a drowning man catches at a white gleam in the black of the surging sea about him--it may be a painted spar, it may be empty foam. The Onlooker prayed. And that very evening he ran up against the Lover at the Temple Station, and he got into the same carriage with him. He said, "Excuse me. You don't remember me?" "I'm not likely to have forgotten you," said the Lover. "I fear my verdict was a great blow. You look very worried, very ill. News like that is a great shock." "It _is_ a little unsettling," said the Lover. "Are you still going on with your usual work?" "Yes." "Speaking professionally, I think you are wrong. You lessen your chances of life! Why don't you try a complete change?" "Because--if you must know, my chances of life have ceased to interest me." The Lover was short with the Onlooker; but he persisted. "Well, if one isn't interested in one's life, one may be interested in one's death--or the manner of it. In your place, I should enlist. It's better to die of a bullet in South Africa than of fright in London." That roused the Lover, as it was meant to do. "I don't really know what business it is of yours, sir," he said; "but it's your business to know that they wouldn't pass a man with a heart like mine." "I don't know. They're not so particular just now. They want men. I should try it if I were you. If you don't have a complete change you'll go all to pieces. That's all."