"Not this time," said Colonel Tempest to himself; "next time."
How often he had said that already! How often his hand had failed him when the moment which he and that other self had agreed upon had arrived! How often he had gone guiltily back to the rooms to which he had not intended to return, and had lain down once more in the bed which had become an accomplice to the torture of every hour of darkness!
Between the horror of returning once again, and the horror of the step into another darkness, his soul oscillated with the feeble violence of despair.
He remembered the going back of yesterday.
"I will not go back again," he said to himself, with the passion of a spoilt child. "I will not—I will not."
"It is time to go home, Master Georgie," said a nursery-maid.
"Just once more, Bessie," pleaded the boy. "Just one single once more."
"Well, then, it must be the last time, mind," said the good-natured arbiter of fate, turning the perambulator, and pushing it along the edge, while the occupant of the same added to the hilarity of the occasion by beating a much-chewed musical rattle against the wheel.
"The last time." The chance words seized upon Colonel Tempest's shuddering panic-stricken mind, and held it as in a vice.
"Next time," he said over and over again to himself. "Next time shall really be the last time—really the last, the very last."