Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/238

 blow at the root of his altruism. He guessed he was one of those who lived by the sword, as the verse in Revelation had said, and he guessed, too, he was going to die by the sword!

There was no sudden and moving climax to his fall. It came slowly, surely, and yet inevitably. The over-thick lees from the fermenting wine of life fell away and settled once more. And he went back to his old pagan tradition and his old pagan code. Perhaps he was not unhappier for it. At any rate he was freer and more natural; there was no attitudinizing and primping, no more morbid introspection and self-abasement.

And even though there may be those who claim that Lonely went back among the unregenerate, it was not that our poor hero stood an especially and hopelessly bad boy: it was only the code that was wrong, the tradition that was still pagan and puerile.

But from this time forward there was a change in Lonely O'Malley. He had emerged dank and sodden from those darkest and yet those divinest currents of human feeling, and it was to be many a long day before that