There are men in whom a week or two of sudden relapse into old and evil courses has an extraordinarily visible effect. Spence was one of them. At the moment he looked as the clay model compares with the finished marble.
Gortre was astounded at the change, but one thing the modern London clergyman learns is tact. The situation was obvious, it explained itself at once, and he nerved himself to deal with it warily and carefully.
Spence himself was ill at ease at they went through the commonplaces of meeting. Then, when they were both seated by the fire and were smoking, he began to speak frankly.
"I can see you are rather sick, old man," he said. "Better have it out and done with, don't you think?"
"Tell me all about it, old fellow," said Gortre.
"Well, there isn't very much to tell, only when I came back from Palestine after all that excitement I felt quite lost and miserable. Something seemed taken away out of one's life. Then there didn't seem much to do, and some of the old set looked me up and I have been racketing about town a good bit."
"I thought you'd got over all that, Harold; because, putting it on no other grounds, you know the game is _not_ worth the candle."
"So I had, Basil, before"--he swallowed something in his throat--"before _this_ happened. I didn't believe in it at first, of course, or, at least, not properly, when I got Hands's letter. But when I got out East--and you don't know and won't be able to understand how the East turns one's ideas upside down even at ordinary times--when I got out there and _saw_ what Hands had found, then everything seemed slipping away. Then the Commission came over and I was with them all and heard what they had to say. I know the whole private history of the thing from first to last. It made me quite hopeless--a terrible feeling--the sort of utter dreariness that Poe talks of that the man felt when he was riding up to the House of Usher. Of course, thousands of people must have felt just the same during the past weeks. But to have the one thing one leaned upon, the one hope that kept one straight in this life, the hope of another and happier one, cut suddenly out of one's consciousness! Is it any wonder that one has gone back to the old temptations? I don't think so, Basil."