Chapter 87

Notwithstanding Alec's diligence and the genial companionship of Mr Cupples--whether the death of Kate, or his own illness, or the reaction of shame after his sojourn in the tents of wickedness, had opened dark visions of the world of reality lying in awful _unknownness_ around the life he seemed to know, I cannot tell,--cold isolations would suddenly seize upon him, wherein he would ask himself--that oracular cave in which one hears a thousand questions before one reply--"What is the use of it all--this study and labour?" And he interpreted the silence to mean: "Life is worthless. There is no glow in it--only a glimmer and shine at best."--Will my readers set this condition down as one of disease? If they do, I ask, "Why should a man be satisfied with anything such as was now within the grasp of Alec Forbes?" And if they reply that a higher ambition would have set him at peace if not at rest, I only say that they would be nearer health if they had his disease. Pain is not malady; it is the revelation of malady--the meeting and recoil between the unknown death and the unknown life; that jar of the system whereby the fact becomes known to the man that he is