The moon shone out suddenly through a rift in the heavy clouds, throwing the tall figure into strong relief, and revealing his face distinctly, stern and set, the scar on his cheek showing livid in the silvery light. As though the unexpected brilliance disturbed him, he altered his rigid attitude abruptly, swung round, and started to walk. He walked rapidly, unconscious of his surroundings in the turmoil of his thoughts. By a process of introspection his mind worked back continually. He regarded himself in a detached, impartial light, as if it were a stranger upon whom he looked, a stranger whose actions he was called upon to criticise and pass judgment upon. Not until that night had he ever considered his actions in a condemnatory light. Life was only a chance... Things had just happened... That had been his philosophy. And he had acted upon it until the thing happened that meant the finish of his career in the Army. He had finished himself socially shortly after that event. His dismissal from the Service had cut him deeply, and he had bitterly resented it. He had enemies. That was what he had asserted at the time, what he still believed. The other affair he treated as a midsummer-night's madness, and spoke of as such. He refused to consider it more seriously. But the midsummer-night's madness had been responsible for more than the wrecking of his career. And it was of that he was thinking chiefly as he walked along the warm, dusty road between the motionless trees that lined the pathway and cast long black distorted shadows upon the ground. He had not called it a midsummer's madness always; he had thought of it--ay, and spoken of it--once as Love. And he had believed the world well lost at the time. But that form of madness is transitory. He had come out of the sickness extraordinarily sane,--scarcely penitential, but with a proper appreciation of the truth of certain lines that came to his sobered senses unbidden, yet with an appropriateness that suggested some occult influence, probably conscience, working upon his mind: "If a man would give all the substance of his house for love, He would be utterly despised." In a sense, he had done that; and he had won the despite such conduct merited. He had been mad. He said it again to himself, muttering the words under his breath. Then he smiled grimly at the thought behind the words. Poor creature of circumstance! To be cured of one form of madness only to develop another! The ever-revolving wheel of fate turned relentlessly, now bearing him, a mere puppet, upward, now downward in its revolutions. The wheel had been turning steadily downward for a long while now. He wondered whether, when it began to rise again, it would still bear him with it, or whether before that time it would have broken him utterly and left him in the uttermost depths. CHAPTER FIVE.