Alone.
Instinctively he had tried to rise. He was lying face downwards at the return of sensation. His legs would not answer the message of his brain when he tried to move them so that he might rise. They lay like long dead cylinders behind him. He was able to drag himself very slowly, for a yard or two, until he reached an ottoman. He could not lift the vast weight of his body into the seat. It was utterly beyond his strength. He propped his trunk against the seat. It was all he was able to accomplish. Icy-cold sweat ran down his cheeks at the exertion. After he had finished moving he found that all strength had left him.
He was paralysed from the waist downwards. The rest of his body was too weak to move him.
Only his brain was working with a terrible activity, there alone in the chill dark.
There came into his molten brain the impulse to pray. Deep down in every human heart that impulse lies.
It is a seed planted there by God that it may grow into the tree of salvation.
The effort was sub-conscious. Almost simultaneously with it came the awful remembrance of what he had done.
A name danced in letters of flame in his brain—JUDAS.
He looked round for some means to end this unbearable torture. He could see nothing, the room was very cold and dark, but he knew there was a case of razors on a table by the window.
When he tried to move he found that he could not. The paralysis was growing upwards.