Blunderingly and only half consciously, I
cast about to collect my dispersed force. For--already I was conscious of it--there still remained one claim that
even in thought I had not advanced. I would, were I permitted, still
write that "Life," but, since it was decreed so, I would no longer urge
that in writing it I justified myself. So I might but write it, I would
embrace my own portion, the portion of doom; yea, though it should be a
pressing of the searing-iron to my lips, I would embrace it; my name
should not appear. For the mere sake of the man I had loved I would write
it, in self-scorn and abasement, humbly craving not to be denied....

_"Oh, let me but do for Love of you what a sinful man can! "_ I
groaned....

A moment later I had again striven to do so. So do we all, when we
think that out of a poor human Love we can alter the Laws by which our
state exists. And with such a hideous anguish as was again mine are we
visited....

And I knew now what that anguish was. It was the twining of body from
spirit that is called the bitterness of Death; for not all of the body
are the pangs of that severance. With that terrible sword of impersonal
Pain the God of Peace makes sorrowful war that Peace may come again. With
its flame He ringed the bastions of Heaven when Satan made assault. Only
on the Gorgon-image of that Pain in the shield may weak man look; and
its blaze and ire had permeated with deadly nearness the "everywhere"
where I was...

"_Oh, not for Love? Not even for Love?_" broke the agonised question from
me.... The next moment I had ceased, and ceased for ever, to resist. Instantaneously the terrible flashing of that sword became no more
than the play of lightning one sees far away in the wide cloudfields
on a peaceful summer's twilight. I felt a gentle and overpowering
sleep coming over me; and as it folded me about I saw, with the last
look of my eyes, my own figure, busily writing at the table. Had I, then, prevailed? Had Pain so purged me that I was permitted to
finish my task? And had my tortured cry, "Oh, not even for Love?" been heard? I did not know. *        *        *        *        *

I came to myself to find that my head had fallen on my desk. The light
still shone within its pearly shade, and in the penumbra of its shadow
the portrait of Andriaovsky occupied its accustomed place. About me were
my papers, and my pen lay where it had fallen from my hand. At first I did not look at my papers. I merely saw that the uppermost of
them was written on. But presently I took it up, and looked at it
stupidly. Then, with no memory at all of how I had come to write what was
upon it, I put it down again. It was indeed a completion. But it was not of Andriaovsky's "Life" that it was the completion. As you
may or may not know, Andriaovsky's "Life" is written by "his friend John
Schofield." I had been allowed to write, but it was my own condemnation
that, in sadness and obedience, in the absence of wrath but also in the
absence of mercy, I had written. By the Law I had broken I was broken in
my turn. It was the draft for the fifth series of _The Cases of Martin
Renard_.