More than once, by the devious means known to such places, Paddy the Brick had procured whisky, and this--though he risked offering no more to his companion but drank it secretly in his bunk at night--had put Harry through other bitter tests of self-control. For the wilful license of the day on which he had ceased to be Harry Sevier had granted fresh and terrible power to the cringing thing that had been mastered and manacled, and the fight he had fought out in that long year Harry had had again to renew, and now without the zest of reward. Again and again, as he sat in his cell, or fed the pungent leathern strips into the clacking shoe-machines in the shop, without warning the demon of thirst had swooped upon him, making his dry throat ache with uncontrollable longing, his palms tingle with itching desire: and at times, when he awoke gasping with the reeking fumes in his nostrils, and heard the gurgle of the liquor in the dark, he had fought with a strenuous desire to fling himself bodily upon his companion and snatch the drink to his own arid lips--fought till the struggle turned him faint with anger, disgust and self-contempt. What lent him in these bitter months the strength for this unequal struggle? Most of all the knowledge that the appetite which he now grappled with in himself, was the patron Genius of that house of Pain. He had learned it from his fellows there, in whose faces alcohol had set its recognisable marks, its baleful brands of ownership. He knew it from a score of dismal histories related by his incorrigible cell-mate, daily allusions, the famished eagerness with which the surreptitious flask was passed from hand to hand. The Spirit of Drink had seemed to him at length to sprawl, a huge, lethargic incubus, over that tortured congeries of crime. Till slowly, very slowly--as human feeling had earlier come to him out of his blankness and torpor--there had dawned in him a mute consciousness of a victory over himself that was to be enduring. The conquest he had thought he had made in that first year of studied avoidance had been no true one. Under stress of anger, grief and resentment, it had fallen in shameful and utter defeat. The real victory that he knew now, had come to him in that prison garb, when black despair had sat by his side through long months--the fruit of a strength born of familiar hand-touch with evil temptation and a hatred of the tempter. As time went on, the surly mood of his cell-mate had grown less difficult, had even softened to a sneering tolerance. "You're improving!" he said one day with a smirk. "So you're making up to the Gospel-Sharp, eh?"