Peter did a surprising thing. He turned quickly, strode over to Graham, put his arm round his shoulder and kissed his cheek. For just those few moments both men had gone back through the years and were little boys again. Two things happened to Graham. He blushed to the roots of his hair, and swallowed something that threatened to choke him. "You said you had something on, didn't you,--supper, or something?" said Peter. "Yes; but I'll cut it out if you want me to." "No, don't. Why should you? I feel pretty rotten and I shall turn in right away. Don't bother about me any more, old man." "I'd rather stay with you." "Yes, I know you would, old boy, but you push off and have a good time. As a matter of fact, I rather want to--to be alone for a bit. D'you see?" "All right, then." And to show that he had become a man again and his own master, Graham went off whistling the latest tango. And by letting his brother go at that moment, Peter did a very unwise thing. He was still weak and ill. His brain, which had not recovered itself from the effects of Kenyon's poisonous mixture, was in no condition to be tortured by solitary thought. He needed to be kept away from self-analysis--to be set to work on the ordinary commonplaces of everyday life. Most of all, his thoughts required to be put to rest by sleep. Left to himself, Peter sat down, almost in the dark, with his arms folded, his legs stuck out and his chin buried in his chest, and thrashed the tired machinery of his brain into action. All that had happened in the last forty-eight hours coming on top of the suffering that he had undergone through having been separated from Betty and having failed to bring about the new relationship with his father, upon which he had set his heart, gradually became distorted. He began to look at everything through an enormous magnifying glass and to see himself, not as one whose loyal, simple and unsuspicious nature had been taken advantage of by Kenyon, but as a common drunken creature who had had to be lifted into a cab and who had spent two nights in the apartment of a woman of the street. He began to look at himself with so deep a humiliation and disgust that the mere thought of his ever again holding Betty in his arms seemed outrageous. And having by stages, made conceivable by the condition of his health and the strain that had been put upon him by all the things that had happened since his return from England, come up to this morbid and hyperconscientious point in his self-condemnation, he stood up suddenly, obsessed by a new and appalling thought. He said to himself: "I'm not only unworthy of Betty, I'm unclean, and so unfit to live." And having seized at that with the avidity and even triumph that comes with a sudden disorder of the understanding, he began to dramatize his death--to ask himself how to make it most effective. And then his father entered his thoughts. "Ah!" he cried inwardly. "Father--it's _father_ who is responsible--it's