CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
STORROW lay in bed, unable to sleep. He lay painfully awake, staring out through the open window at a star which hung in the sky, slightly above the black ramparts of the house-roofs towering as gloomily above him as the walls of a gaol-yard. He went back over his life, page by page, with that imper- sonal detachment which comes only to the wakeful after midnight. And as he lay there, deliberately and labor- iously balancing up the over-complicated ledger of ex- istence, it struck him as odd that the star at which he stared should hang so serene in the midst of a sky equally serene, while he himself remained so humanly fevered and troubled in spirit. Night, he remembered, had once been able to bring him peace. Sleep, until he came to that great city of unrest, had never seemed reluctant to refill the lowered reservoirs of vitality. Always, before that, he had found the hours of darkness ready to dedicate themselves to the quiet restoration of mind and body, no matter whether his pillow had been a pine-bough or a folded Hudson-Bay blanket or even the thwart of a Rice- Lake canoe. Always the sigh of the wind in tree-tops or the lap of water on pebbly shores had lulled him away from any distractions that crowded his day.
But now, with the nocturnal hum of the city in his ears, he found no art to relax the over-tensioned bow. The fault, he knew, lay in his own heart, sour with dis- gust, heavy with defeat, tortured with the thought that he had made a failure of life. Step by step he recalled his earlier hopes and aspirations, his older and cleaner
ways of life, his more eager and lighthearted outlook on
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