He completely lost self-control only once. It was a cold, wet May night and
everything had gone against him that day. He looked drearily round his
rooms as he came in. How stiff, how forbidding, how desert they seemed! He
threw himself into a big chair.
"No friends," he thought, "no one that cares a rap whether I live or die,
suffer or am happy. Nothing to care for. Why do I go on? What's the use if
one has not an object--a human object?"
And their life together came flooding back--her eyes, her kisses, her
attentions, her passionate love for him, so pervasive yet so unobtrusive;
the feeling of her smooth, round arm about his neck; her way of pressing
close up to him and locking her fingers in his; the music of her voice,
singing her heartsong to him yet never putting it into words----
He stumbled over to the divan and stretched himself out and buried his face
in the cushions. "Come back!" he sobbed. "Come back to me, dear." And then
he cried, as a man cries--without tears, with sobs choking up into his
throat and issuing in moans.
"Curious," he said aloud when the storm was over and he was sitting up,
ashamed before himself for his weakness, "who would have suspected me of
this?"
IX.
AMBITION AWAKENS.
Howard was now thirty-two.
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